Muse of a new day, how is it that you are the way you are? -- feeling so much,
so that you may wish not ever to feel, as if you were not the one chosen,
still dressed in a cloak of a million lights.

But I claim that is what makes you brilliant, though feeling does not save.

You can travel all the way to Mars,
digging up the waters of your sub-consciousness to serve as your thoughts.
Please, don't plead to the skies and lead your life astray,
looking at constellations too long might make you want to stay among the grey.

You and I, we’re not so different.

Too long have I lingered in studies of the stars
and missed the comrade human hours.
Sad as the monotone of the sea, I tossed away the stone of my powers.
And now, as I weightlessly wing amongst the churches of my nameless city, I see it all so clearly:

The monotony voices the unspoken plea,
of a life better lived than pondered,
better felt than conquered.

Some place where fame

holds no sway

Some world where violets

never fade

Somewhere someday...

Lies a dream reborn within a dream


Dreams overturn reality

When your thoughts flare with the stars

It's impossible to be an artist

With your feet on solid earth


In all the antiquity of art

we live in a time that barely notices

that while our ideas may levitate

the course world keeps our feet pinned down


We can try and float above the expectations

But the tyrant label will tie us to the earth

Shamed with the name of “struggling artist”

Which you don’t rise above



Instead you sit

With a copper coin cup at your feet

Selling your soul daily

In the torments of time


When I look into the deep eyes of art

I see this lack and struggle and longing

and I am thrown back into despair,

into the starved storms of any fading morning


The best we can do

Is turn the despair

Into something worth admiring

Take the past

And display it

On our present-day canvases


The world is stacked against the very idea

of taking creativity seriously,

except as a hobby,

yet we try anyway

although we know this from the start,

because the alternative,

Conformity,

does not satisfy our restless minds  


I clench my fists in the corner of the room

As the eyes stay fixed to silicon screens

Everything turns a hazy shade of blue

As social media fills the air


All I want to do is write a poem

One filled with imagery that contains no character limit

About how the eyes of the lonely

Stay glued to phones

Dominating our reality


But is the scene truly filled?

Or is it a vast emptiness?

How real is real?

That tells me that we, the sensitive different types, need one another

Or they will surely clone us

In their own image


So I encourage you

Breathe poetry

Cry paint

Do not let the world turn you monotonous

for the second we lose

Those colorful tears

And those darkly beautiful words

We lose something more than a hobby

We lose a life worth living


Or else it's a black and white reality at best

Although some see style in the monochromatic

I prefer colors and light

Enough to see

It's a black and white world without you,

It's a black and white world without you


Sarah Kersey
Joseph Paris