Oh look, here’s another artist.
Nostalgic since birth and obsessed with their own mortality,
counting what is worth noticing before we are all exiled, cut
off from our own bodies.
Yes, we all know what’s coming, sh.
It’s all been heard before, all been seen.
So don’t raise your voice with worn out warnings,
dry as wind whispering through desert caves,
you are echoing the trumpets
that have sounded since the beginning of time.

Now here comes a lover coated in gleaming delusion,
confident in the supreme uniqueness of her experience,
asserting that no,
you cannot possibly know what it is like.
This is different.
        And when it falls apart, the uproar!
        The injustice of it! The tragedy!
        and the loneliness,
        as if no one else had ever felt rejection,
        as if no one else had ever discovered
        that love is painful and reductive.
        Disillusioned and duped she wonders why
        there were no warnings. Imagine!
        Living in this world and not hearing warnings,
        or hearing them and having the arrogance to say no,
        it does not apply to me,
        you cannot possibly know.

And now the green poet floats by,
driven on by spring breezes and the color of wildflowers.
Wide-eyed but never quite struck dumb,
he gawks and wonders and wishes,
plucking detail from gulls’ wings and leaves’ veins,
gamely trying to translate and bankrupting the dictionary every time,
saying “this is beautiful” over and over,
not unlike a tourist.
And like a tourist disappearing
before he sees the bleak and desperate side,
the side that rears it’s head with hungry eyes
and regards you as a stranger.

But still, to create something that absorbs all that people say about it.
To become something like that, finally.
Maybe … it is still worth something?

But no,
time to time, there has been time. Time
for the sun to rise and set,
and for the stars to be born and then burn out. Time
to hear the rise and fall of a thousand stories,
and a thousand more. Time
to be filled with curiosity and questions. Time
to stop asking questions. Time
to see the same patterns again and again. Time
for new patterns, but with the same trite components. Time
to say all that is worth saying, and more.
Much more.
The same voices, the same faces,
the same conversations, again.
The contrast getting grayer, going soft.
And once again all these young people
using their superlatives, investing everything right away,
saying “this is important.”
Children who believe the best and worst things
that have ever happened
are happening now.

Is it problematic to say I find my own heartbeat cliché?
Even the rise and fall of my chest as I breathe
exasperates me. It’s been done before,
it’s all been done before.
This is why I will never point at anything and say
“this is something.”
Nor will I say who I am or who you are.
I leave you to your own ugly assumptions.