Blue Skies-embers Of Sunset-a Little Pink Butterfly Blown Somewhere Against Its Will. Reminds Me Of Someone

I see uber has upped their game

 ...

Sometimes I feel lonely with physical heaviness in my chest. Can somebody please love me a little?

*goes to the top of a cliff and and whispers to a bird which obviously doesn’t care, “It’s my birthday today” and is met with a blank stare and an indignant ruffle and is left with the words echoing emptily across the hillside*

April 13,

Islets of grey amidst a sea of coral and azure. I could breathe in the beauty of the evening and spend a lifetime in its transitions from russet and gold to the dimness of twilight. Poetry, happiness and peace are in the air for those who care. Beautiful. Beautiful. I can’t repeat it enough times. I am lost and found again. Redemption is sweet.

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.

Untitled

White, as if a shroud for one's dead,

Came the rain to cover the twisted

Smile with which the city laid.

The salt-wet cloud pressed down

Apologetically down on the wails

To muffle down the alleys where

Fear smelt sharper than the guilty

Lust for life.

The smoke rose up and died

In the arms of the rain

And the bruised earth cooled itself

Down to sleep on the sidewalk

Tattered from toes to head

And a loaf of wet, burned bread

Fed the hunger in their

Grim, kerosene-masked eyes.

There was a road from living,

So they said, and it was hope

That shone on the edge of

The blade. Prayers curled up

In its handle like a dirty scroll

Pushed up in a crypt, to hold onto

And to give up to the fire when

Rain shattered all.

- pollosky-in-blue