Creating majesty with the maggots.
Creatures crawling in the filth
will always have a feast.
Grabbing the greatest and the least
decay persists.
Get comfortable with chaos.
Create

We must carry great faith in our young writers,
I must carry great faith in me,
Carry great faith in he, they, she,
Who?
Those who will inherit the art we cherish,
Keep it close, stringing together what emotions were lost,
We know the real cost.

I am a quiet, silent man,
Dwelling deep within myself.
What I long to say aloud,
I pour into a letter’s shell.

She, playful, fleeting like the breeze,
All that I express in words,
She replied with a single image,
And spoke with her eyes unheard.

How beautiful those nights once were,
What magic lived in those old days!
Today again, my heart desires
To send you a letter… always.

But this time, through an artist's hand,
This letter shall reach your grace.
Some words of the heart remain unsaid,
That only colors can embrace.

To the painter I make one humble plea
When you read my letter’s line,
Sketch her soul upon the page,
And let her truest face shine.

Let us see
If my words still hold the weight
Of truth, of ache, of silent grace.
And if she, when the artist paints,
Still wears that same beloved face...
Or was it all just well-performed
a role she played through posed displays?

Have you ever felt the hunger deep inside?
The monster with its insatiable cravings,
The claws that promise to tear you apart
That beast that calls itself inspiration,
The terror that says it is drive to create

Have you seen the ghost that lingers
Behind blue-tinted window-panes, in the breath
Of white vapor on a snowy day? Have you seen
‘It’, it that lives in heartbreak and mines it
For sepia-tinted photographs and
Confusing poems?

I’ve seen it on sunny days, in the way warmth
Lights me up inside - though even more than that,
It’s the memory-hued colors of California afternoons
It’s the way those colors look on print, even though
I can’t ever capture its feeling

And that’s what it is, isn’t it
The reach to put the unexplainable into words,
The unimaginable into pictures
The pain of it into being

I open my ribs.  
peeling back the sinews and  
capillaries with precision.  
The crack of spreading bones,  
my chambered apparatus laid  
delicately on the table.  
  
My implement extracts its pound
onto the slab with intention,  
pulled and pressed till it's paper  
thin and bled out. Soulspeak scrawled  
in the crackling veins of my parchment.  
  
I put my machinations on display  
for onlookers, merchants  
and collectors  
but none seem to gather any interest.  
Skinpull another page  
but nothing sells  
or charms or foments.  

I pack my wares and  
toss them onto the pile of  
my dried out corpse scattered  
on the floor.  
Failure.  
Another procedure.  
Relent, repeat, cut deeper.  
And hope to find a reader.

I was meant to be a masterpiece
but I remain a sketch
left leaning against the wall,
my outlines fading in the silence.

The brush never touched me.
No colors ever dared to fill me in.
I am paused mid-creation,
a ghost of what I could’ve been.

Turned away from the light,
as if my presence is too loud,
too much,
too unfinished to be seen.

Not art.
Not ruin.
Just something left behind
too heavy to display,
too delicate to destroy,
too much of a burden to face.

Never love an artist,
They don't have beauty left to give you.

You love me,
I try to give you all my beauty,
Though it curdles, turning into a night we regret.

Leaving you upset.

I chiseled away at my marble,
chipping off the faults they proclaimed,
carving the weird, the unworthy,
leaving veins of 'truth'
Fingerprints linger in the dust on the floor,
where the best remnants lay forgotten,
the shoes that were too goody,
the hips that were too round,
the laugh that was too loud,
the silly khaki-less fantasies tie-dyed
and woven with moonbeams.
I stood in galleries,
tying my approval to wanted 'yays'
but no one recognized the girl
who was still holding the hammer.
I sat beside her,
my hand upon the chasm,
where a heart should've burgeoned,
and felt only stone,
pining for her name within the dolomite.
The crows brought me a mirror,
reflecting the squareness I had tried to shape
from my hexagonal being,
edges missing, sanded down
to match the softness of the world.
'rebuild' they cawed
recementing, unhallowing,
letting the fractures bloom moss,
and the rough edges catch the light,
we are not meant to echo.
Let the gallery grow wild,
breaking through the sedimentary,
sparkling eternal agate
from the stardust of which we are made.

Flowing across the page.
Everything comes to me at once.
The colors dance upon the paper.
Like a performance on a stage.

The only one in the audience is me.
Observant and thinking about the next step.
I am voiceless.
So I let the dancers speak for me instead.

As a voice for the voiceless.
They understand my heart.

Colors flowing across the page.

The colors dance upon the paper.

The only one in the audience is me.

Watching as it becomes alive.

Letting go is not a single act-
it is art made in fragments.
Like tearing a beloved photograph
Pixel by pixel
until smile fades.

It begins with silence,
the kind that grows like moss
over memory.
You stop correcting their name
when people ask.
You stop replaying the what-ifs
like your breath depends on them

It is an unlearning-
of their laugh, their scent,
their rhythm when they walked away.
You erase them
not with fire,
but with absence.

There's no applause in this gallery.
No frame for your pain.
Just the brushstroke of each
morning
where you choose not to look back.

You start to fill your lungs with now,
to water seeds you almost forgot
to plant.
You realize your heart
was never meant to be a museum
of people who left,
but a garden
for who you're becoming.

Letting go isn't moving on-
it's moving in.
into yourself.
into peace.
into the blank space
where you finally
begin again