Poetry does not speak, it convulses,
shuddering like a wounded archangel in the throat of infinity.
It is the volcanic hemorrhage of truth upon the alabaster of silence,
a delirium that rends the cosmos into trembling syllables.
Where language expires, Poetry thrashes –
a sacred spasm, crowning the abyss with fire.
Speaking of abyss, i am walking underground in a tunnel in a train station in poetic company because i’m with my friend Jano and he’s a poet. this may be a pedestrian tunnel but our conversation is in the stratosphere because it’s about our appreciation of The Beautiful and the Abstract so in this tunnel we’re two shopping carts of ontology floating down a stream of commuter spillover.
Jano has now gone quiet, so on the shores of the stream i notice a man next to a bicycle which has been prepared so as to expose laminated A4 sheets of poetry hanging around it. i stop and ask the man if i can peruse the stuff.
i consume the text, and predictably, the words and concepts in there are pompous and attempt to transcend, the kind of shit that takes five readings and four polite questions to understand halfway (totally unlike my stuff), but i don’t care, because it’s really the sight of the physical poet himself, rather than the fartsy work, which gives me a grain of trust in this contemptful world. this barren wasteland of aesthetic bankruptcy.
i thank him for sharing this.
He (I’ll call him Ismael (because that’s his name)) responds that he is happy to be here sharing it in person, rather than online, that he prefers this, the human contact, to see his readers. because authors with best-selling books in bookshops, he points out, barely meet a fraction of their readers, let alone see them in the eyes.
his eyes observe the outer space between mine. Pluto, he says. most feedback bookshop authors get is expressed via their bank account balance and has the granularity of Pluto seen with the naked eye.
now you’ll recall Jano is, himself, a poet as well, and I rotate my neck to take in a heartwarming sight of Jano feasting on this fellow poet’s work, but Jano isn’t here, he kept walking, ignored the generosity of the poet before us. Shunning the connection. yet Jano is a poet, he understands the struggle of finding the audience for this art form soon to be fully eaten by machines, and whose unique selling point nowadays is the human before you producing the work rather than a screen spitting it out from the depths of some servers in a cold data center in Ohio.
this snubbing Jano poet friend of mine… We have spent the entire afternoon together, discussing the world and its discontents, achieving transcendent unity through our exquisite artistic sensibilities. Now Jano hasn’t produced (or shared) a poem in at least a good five sad years, and now shuns the opportunity to meet a fellow poet, in a city watching the alps where such encounters are rarer than poetry books that sell more than seventeen copies.
my friend Jano has abandoned art, and my heart is broken.
the Generous Poet Ismael feels something is missing in my gaze, glides towards me, inquires, learns, puts a supportive hand on my shoulder while he shares words on the struggle of poetry within this capitalist cesspit where verses need profit margins. this hellhole that stomps down the artist in you to turn you into a productive industrial pawn. I must consider that Jano has fallen victim to the machine, and this raw display of poetic hope confronts him with his own artistic burial, of his own abandoned calling, of the frustration that probably cries him to sleep every night as he comes up with viable similes for the flavour of the salt in his tears. and fails.
As I walked homeward, consumed by grief, my phone chimed with a txt from the fallen artist himself:
“bro sorry had to run i really needed to take a shit. who were you with”