The Mild Breeze Twisted Over The Cloud Of Sunset,

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

-

asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

Miles of Rain

The days after school haven't met change

Since times seasons revolved round the sun

You still wait by the corner lane

And I walk up after the bells have rung.

We eat a mouthful of your smoke

And break off bits of corn to make cake

Before we slip into the deep red of the

Bell-cracked wine glass with a rake

On Wednesdays you say, my hair looks nice,

That's for the soap I needed to save till

The next month so we didn't run out of rice.

There is, you know, comfort in unwashed mill

And yet more softness in hands that are soiled

To the nails in lovers' mud and dust.

It is only the shortness of one arm that

Asks to be coupled to twos at first.

Still, your fingers are long enough

To meet both ends and still cup snow

For us to breathe in the iced snuff,

To keep awake among the rafters below

For a few moments more.

We laugh at eachother's smiles

Lie forgetting and run wilder than raccoons

In Philadelphian winters, though miles

Of shadow could never erase these monsoons.

Unless you make it so, these months

Don't hold weddings or coronations

Or those hourly bypasses to coffee haunts,

But as it is, the gaps are fit to ration.

It has always been the dry edge of monsoon

Since times the seasons revolved round the sun.

- pollosky-in-blue

What more foolish than to believe happiness is the ultimate ambition of a society whose very foundation is built upon a thwarted craving for meaning and its pillars insatisfaction ? Unhappiness and insufficiency are the driving forces behind economic expansion. The horror of contentment, the very notion of it is injurious to capitalism. So, in a way, a constant search for and accumulation of wealth is equated with success and to not deliriously overwork oneself in the name of ambition becomes failure, or as an excellently absurd term puts it ‘wasted potential’. Perhaps the implication here that any ability to create or produce is disqualified to be of any value unless it is yielded in a way enabling it to be monetised is collectively unacknowledged by society, or consciously endorsed. A bit of prodding into this brings one to the despaired question. What indeed is humankind’s core want? Or in other words, what would compel a thinking person to serve bureaucracy if their fundamental need were met and a decent standard of living provided?

Also another thing that bothers me is the quasi-philosophical belief that suffering is somehow superior to happiness in both meaning and virtue. The dreadfulness of pain masquerades as intellectualism and, to borrow a phrase from LeGuin, the banality of evil is wrapped up in folds of mystery. The ideology that ‘suffering should be endured for the potential of a reward later’ (and not to seek any meaning in itself, which, although questionable is a manifold better reason to engage in masochism) is one that is encouraged and spread by those in power. This is an abuse of religion and an exploitation of people’s values done more or less solely for the purpose of keeping people perceived beneath them in check. This state of affairs is more prevalent than it appears to be at first glance and is a disgrace to the few who actually work for the welfare of people. This has been a rant. Thank you.

“About every individual’s soul there is an unspoken loneliness, you might try and deny it, but it is the very intrinsic nature of the fabric of consciousness. And this void is the one we try and fill with despaired illusions of love and the pretension of not acknowledging it.”

Does anyone else have this strange compulsion to try and - in a sense - store everything you read that moves you, everything you write, as though trying to piece together a cohesive person? almost as if the pieces you’ve collected of yourself could somehow make up for all the life you leave unlived ?

“Taking refuge in the abandoned terrace, forsaken by all but me, an odd squirrel or two, a lone bird, watched the crippling ivy of despair wound itself around the child of sorrow I had let in to warm herself by my slowly smouldering hearth. Gently she knelt, oh so softly she sang, bewitched me into thinking the house was freezing, coal upon coal I blindly shoved unto the fire, and whom was the blazing house to blame? for t’was never a home.”

2022-06-18

Hydrangea

Canon EOS R3 + RF50mm f1.2L

Instagram  |  hwantastic79vivid

‘I would like you not to forget me’

She whispered with her last breath,

A grave demand it was, the wish to keep for her

a page of memory, warped and stained

By time’s tender erosion, and fill it with lavender and rose,

What matter if the world should burn and fall

to ruin faraway, a graveyard is a desecration to

the song of the earth written in the stars,

I’d forsake heaven and the angels

for a glimpse of your hand,

eternity can scream into the abyss,

and all I ask is to have you buried beside me.

Lone stars to be my long forgotten secrets,

And the night sky depraved of her jewels to be

My heart, the calls of the woods are drowned out

by the voice of the ocean, singing with

all the sweetness of a pathway home.

Amidst the never-ending hush of the port that harbours lost souls,

The trees can only ache for the archangel’s love,

home’s beneath the world, where the body of the

Captain’s sweetheart lies, washed away by

the clawing tide, into the veiled hearts of the

Pearls scattered upon the shore, lost forevermore

To the flowing hold of the sea and the earth.

It’s an autumn twilight and the valley of violets has

yet to spare a rose

for the lovers lying dead by the cove.

Mortality constantly staring you in the face is a wonderful thing. Isn’t this one of the enduring harms inflicted by religion, imbuing everything with eternity? Perhaps this is why everyone does things as they do it. Death is shrouded by ritual and custom, and truth is masked under familiarity. You know you are going to die, but do you actually believe it?

Evening at the Balcony

I smoke the night from my neighbour's pipe

When the smell of baking bread and piano pieces

Are gone down with the sun, and the cloud creases

Over the sea of mountains where lights rest dove-like

I rise from a wasted pile of blankets and books for a hike

To the balcony. I stop at the corolla vines and stand by,

And wait with the jackdaws until the smoke billows up to the sky.

One night, sharing unseen my neighbour's cigarette

And their voices that lend themselves to a radio babble

I watched a single star warmed by the clouds and space rubble

It fluttered, almost clattered so bright

Its fire spilled and burned the balmy night.

One by one shreds of clouds caught spark and rushed away

And believe me when I say the moon hid under the trees today.

Tonight again, I waited at the moon for the shared smoke

And tonight I found a friend in the fig tree, it spoke

To me as I would have thought it might

But at its wild branches rustling the jackdaws took to flight

Yet alone I wasn't, for the purple tree and I

Could speak as old friends, warming up by and by

It knows now all the stale words and song

That fumes in my head all evening long.

In turn I have mapped out its lost heart.

- pollosky-in-blue