How to debone a milkfish

I was not born in the mold of a meaningful artist — my streets, too cripple; my voice, too dilettante. In a list of names, I am the blank underline stamped in eternal black ink, eyes up in hate and hope, in an awe that is slightly bipolar and wholly proletariat.

What critics miss in tasteful masturbation is that the greatest art of all is not a painting nor a poem that juxtaposes, or oscillates, or whatever bullshit verb they've fed the conveyor this week, but in the simple, perfect act of deboning a milkfish.

First, a quick, calculated cut across the spine, spreading the fish into an indecent open symmetry, all secrets bared. The chassis which once enclosed a full ten-month life is broken into evidence of man's evolved superiority, why else but because of the classical reasoning — my life means more than yours. 

Then, a precise, straight-curve knife along the dorsal. There is no blood, but there is joy, a guttural pleasure in the killing of a dead thing.

And here, my favorite step —

Once the milkfish is laid open, and the backbone is removed, glinting gray forceps pull the rib bones out in a fast flurry of damnation. A blur of brown fingers and white bones fly mid-air. The milkfish is dead and alive, more animated than it had ever been gasping in the wetness of sea.

There's skill to it. There's dexterity. There's math, and physics, and poetry. The butcher is blissfully unaware.

How does he differ from the dancing limbs in darkened theaters, whose memorized moves mesmerize the audience? His canvas is not paper but a wooden block. There is no difference, but in name.

And I will keep watching him, and describing him, wrapping him in words too pretentious for sobriety, because I am not a meaningful artist. I am a worm wriggling in the mansions of those whose pee reaches the cultural sky. 

Those who make the space, decide the space.

And I am not an artist, and neither are they.

Only the butcher, with his knife and butterfly cut, only he makes art, the greatest art of all.