After a painting by Seong Ryong Kim

What brought you to this state?
Skin removed, ivory bones replaced
with the cold of metal, engineered
so as to reinforce this graceless stance.
They haul you from warehouse to warehouse.
In crates of fumigated wood they move you,
specialists practiced in the art of light
deprivation and the skill of quiet transport.
In time, you will return home. They will pry
this worn helmet from your oversized head
and teach you new uses for each prosthesis.
Ways are devised to cover you up, to hide
this strangely phallic sharp addition
and assurances are given again: One day
treaties will be revised to avoid such cruelty.
The long campaign is ending now,
but the delivery of art does not.
You are taken to a new museum,
skin peeled back in awkward biological study.
Each sharp contrast of ink, vein and artery,
bluish muscle, orange mechanized tendon,
serves to expose and humiliate.
The human spirit quivers, entrained
in the carefully burnished strokes.
Always, your one good eye stares back.