by Theo
Watching someone curl in on themself in utter despair is hard, but witnessing someone transition into melancholy while still sitting tall and proper is heartbreaking. A man had been living in the mundane perpetuation and had just been asked, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
He wept for he did not have an answer.
It’s poetic, really, the weeping. The way someone can let down their guard in such a disgraceful manner is an act of thou poets. There is horror in the margins and grief in the stanzas.
Poetry and weeping have more in common than often thought. The build-up and the collapse of feeling and story are prominent in both. To be displayed in a broken, anarchic manner is that of weeping, but to be displayed in a beautiful, fulfilling manner is that of poetry.
It’s funny, actually, how a poet’s work can be fulfilling, though a poet is never fulfilled. A poet is the man weeping, the man so accustomed to his surroundings he finds everything new of romance. He creates a world in his mind only interrupted by the suspicion of others, so the puissant question, a sense of doubt, is undeniably too much.
Poets create their own eternities, many upon many, to escape the vastness of reality. A poet will preach about the curvature of his character’s collarbone on his lips, the taste of his fabrication’s lips against his own, even if he is the only lover left in the world. He is lost in his head. He spends too much time listening and not speaking of his eternities, just letting the present steer his epic. He sees the full story behind things others wouldn’t even notice; if he can’t he feels lost, out of control, and that worries him.
But just as a poet erases his sense of self--and for once lets himself exist, just for the sole purpose of existing--some of that worry may be gone. The music of a musician, which inspires the work of the poet, makes him feel like their species aren’t quite so close to the precipice, so close to the extermination of art.
artist note-
I started writing it when I saw a man on the train I was on crying while the man athwart him was reading a book of Poe's most famous works. I saw the beauty in that and ran wild with it.