March 1990, Boston cold enough to preserve guilt. Frames on the wall like missing teeth. Two cops walk in, or maybe two costumes with badges attached. Funny thing about trust, usually opens the door itself. Night guard, bored, coffee spill, fluorescent flicker. Graveyard shift drift, half asleep, picture picker. Buzzer inside a log out of phase, people don't question a mustache talks smooth like a late night preacher. Fake badge flash quicker than a lottery feature. Museum hush thicker than funeral smoke. Rich folks' frames hanging heavy with invisible jokes. Rembrandt watching all the sideways ways like human beings are still strange these days. One tied up nervous, one tied up neat. Duct tape theology wrapped around the feet. They move room to room like they practiced the silence. Canvas disappearing under velvet-lined violence. Not smash and grab, stupid surgical greed. High class ghosts with working class needs. Go! Gold grip, slick slip, dim-lit heist. Oil paint saints, Spanish overnight. Twice security sleep and history bleeding. Fortune got legs when desperation's feeding. Empty frames, still worth millions. Whole room rich, still feel villainous. Laugh now, cry when the lights low. Somebody stole the angels right out the window. Empty frames, dust where the gold hung. Everybody watching, nobody told none. (Nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody). Everything look normal. City woke up hungover with cultural amnesia. Newspaper screaming like bad cafeteria pizza. Billionaires furious, critics dramatic. One old lady fainting at the gift shop magnets. 13 gone, still 13 ghosts. Wine sipping donors making theories at brunch toast. Probably mafia, inside job maybe. Probably hidden underneath somebody's gravy. FBI pins on a corkboard wall. Red string spaghetti going nowhere at all. Every suspect look like somebody's uncle. Cheap cologne, confidence packed in a duffel. They stole a Vermeer smaller than a notebook page. Funny little painting, nationwide rage. Meanwhile, Rendu south side saying we got iron, really loud, but the headlines don't speak. Don't speak. Don't speak. One thief maybe panicked, one maybe prayed. One maybe stared at the art they betrayed. 'Cause somewhere between the greed and the scheme, maybe they felt what beauty really means. Everybody got a price, till the price gets paid. Everybody want forever, till forever starts to fade. Gold frame, cracked name, history. Fragile human hands ruin things. Human hands build them up. Empty frames still tell stories. Missing pieces outlive glories. Light leaking through the cracks low. Sometimes wisdom only enters where the past grow. Empty frames, people still gather. Searching for beauty through disaster. March 1990, two men walked in dressed like answers. Thirty-some years later, still nobody knows their names. But everybody remembers what disappeared.
