once their feet were safely clear...

THE PAINTING
What brings you to me?
What causes you to erect your body stationary
in front of my rectangular flatness?
I am a stretched cloth bridge abutment,
Waiting for the artist to lend a hand;
A hand and some markings.
The markings make hands,
Sometimes minstrels; or stern, posed faces; timbers, or black eyes.
Terror has been gently mixed in, but I hang and do not perambulate.
I am all things to no one,
But something to everyone who chances a glimpse.
What am I but canvas and colour?

Last night, I chose to rest my head in a garden just outside the city walls of Nuremberg. The night was long and full of great beauties and good beer. We were unceremoniously kicked out of our hotel because one of our party flicked off the concierge. Those besides me decided to employ a taxi driver to ferry them back to Ansbach. I was intent on seeing the Neusmuseum: State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg, and therefore chose to close the doors on the car once their feet were safely clear.
It was four in the morning, and I headed to the nearest, uninhabited garden, pulled my sweater around me and plopped down on my back amid the mulch and chlorophyll. Five gently restless hours later, I stood up and brushed off as I meandered towards the huge glass facade of the museum. Huge shades rolled up to reveal the building inside. 5,50 Euro allowed me the time and the pass to amble amid artwork and objects.
I must say that only a few pieces did anything for me. Luckily, art could be categorized as "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance," and pieces which I thought were crappy could actually hold aesthetic appeal to someone else. One of my favorite pieces is the building architecture itself, concocted by a man named Volker Staab. But the piece on display in a certain art-containing room was one on the third floor. I don't recall what it was called, but it aroused me like a sunset over snowcapped mountains. It was a large square of black metal approx one meter squared, and uniformly half a centimeter thick. One corner was bent approx thirty degrees off the plane of the rest of the shape, the crease in the metal describing the hypotenuse of an isosceles, right triangle. This triangle couldn't have been more than 5 percent of the whole, and the whole form was screwed into the wall using three screws placed at natural intervals a few centimeters in from the vertexes of the triangle. This caused the angle between the wall and the larger portion of the square to be congruent with that caused by the bent portion.
It caught my eye at first due to its novelty, I was confused when I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I couldn't resist the urge, so I waited until no guards were around, and thunked it with the knuckle on my right hand. The sound was gentle and low, which seemed to complement the black color.

"...the little thing that locks the bottle of beer?"
"bottle cap" I answered.

On those things upon which I'm reliant,
I find myself strangely compliant,
For the needing makes the wanting
Ask the hoping for advice.
And of my neediness, I'm wont,
To know I'm heading towards fabricating vice.