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