While Reading Virginia Woolf In Class, My University Professor Mentioned How Most Victorian Women Often

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

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asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

Sometimes I feel lonely with physical heaviness in my chest. Can somebody please love me a little?

Mortality constantly staring you in the face is a wonderful thing. Isn’t this one of the enduring harms inflicted by religion, imbuing everything with eternity? Perhaps this is why everyone does things as they do it. Death is shrouded by ritual and custom, and truth is masked under familiarity. You know you are going to die, but do you actually believe it?

To love another as myself is the highest love possible because it signifies an erasure of division, no other, no rigid self either. The light of life is united through recognition and similarity

“Taking refuge in the abandoned terrace, forsaken by all but me, an odd squirrel or two, a lone bird, watched the crippling ivy of despair wound itself around the child of sorrow I had let in to warm herself by my slowly smouldering hearth. Gently she knelt, oh so softly she sang, bewitched me into thinking the house was freezing, coal upon coal I blindly shoved unto the fire, and whom was the blazing house to blame? for t’was never a home.”

I have come to a conclusion, after mulling it over for a while, that happiness has been been cast off and melancholy embraced perhaps not because of the evil and dark being more beckoning, nor is it because of the naivety associated with joy, though perhaps this might be one, for effervescence is so often confused with gladness that it is no surprise that it is seen to be foolish, but because it has become now that stillness and silence are symbolic of melancholy, while happiness is characterised by permanent high-spirits. Contemplation and reflection are few things that bring inner tranquility, for many it is the source of peace. Thus for some any absence of continuous childlike behaviour becomes sadness and for the others any presence of natural laughter and to not always be lost in a maze of cluttered thoughts becomes immaturity. I’m somehow both of these people.

“Dreams of a furnace, the warmth of the ember flickering upon the brick wall covered in the scrawls of innocent childhood, heavy clouds spread over the evening fading away into twilight, the eternal impermanence of the gently touching darkness and light surrounded the townhouse, awaiting the shrill shattering of the heart - held together and wrenched apart - by the forsaken ties of lost loves. will not a shard of glass pierce the trembling heart and end its agony, once and for all? And in the indifference of the glowering sky laid the ruin of kingdoms gone and kingdoms to come. The nymphs of wind care not about your sorrow, the angel of death and the moon kissed and parted last before the beginning of eternity. Run vainly to language and lay your wasted hands and tear stained face upon her breast, and spare nature her indifference.”

For those of you who asked, here’s a list of some of my favourite poems:

Soleil et Chair (Sun and Flesh), Arthur Rimbaud Litany, Rebecca Linderberg A Myth of Devotion, Louise Glück L’Après-Midi d’un Faune (The Afternoon of The Faun), Stéphane Mallarmé Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath It’s No Use, Sappho (tr. Barnard) Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, Rainer Maria Rilke The Glass Essay, Anne Carson Alchimie du Verbe (Alchemy of the Word), Arthur Rimbaud I Will Wade Out, E. E. Cummings Mrs. Beast, Carol Ann Duffy Elsa au Miroir (Elsa at The Mirror), Louis Aragon To Fanny, John Keats The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke Persephone The Wanderer (I), Louise Glück Mad Girl Love Song, Sylvia Plath He Seems to Me, Sappho (tr. Carson) F. de Samara to A. G. A., Emily Brontë Pietà, Rainer Maria Rilke (and its many translations) To Proserpine (Orphic Hymn), Anonymous The Unicorn, Angela Carter Saying Your Names, Richard Siken Apparition, Stéphane Mallarmé The Tiger, Pablo Neruda Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath Clair de Lune, Roland Leighton I Like My Body When, E. E. Cummings When We With Sappho, Kenneth Rexroth Look On This Picture and On This, Christina Rossetti Nacciyar Tirumoli, Andal (tr. Sarukkai Chabria) Zuleikha, Rumi Marathon, Louise Glück The Red Poppy, Louise Glück The Concert of Hyacinths, Odysseus Elytis (tr. by Kimon Friar) Song for an Ancient City, Amal El-Mohtar Prayers in a Temple, Yusuf al-Khal (tr. by Abdullah al-Udhari) The Convent Threshold, Christina Rossetti Letter to Husband, Emily Berry my love, E. E. Cummings Glanmore Sonnet X, Seamus Heaney Plead for Me, Emily Brontë

Loneliness sometimes takes strange shapes I suppose, there is a kind that the fervently wants recorded in word or image every thought and deed, an underlying fear of being forgotten, afraid of never being truly known. Perhaps the feverish words scrawled in the middle of the night are just intended to be a reaffirmation of your existence, even though no one might read it.

Indigo roses, idyllic nights and stolen almosts’.

Winds of Hy-brasil fondle softly the body

stretched on the grave of the buried gods of music

and forlorn hands over the field of forget-me-nots,

held lovingly at the chasm’s precipice.

Forget your thorns, mon amour,

and you’ll see why you mustn’t gather dreams—loves—

that have been left to get lost and embedded

in crevasses between thwarted desire and the wistfulness of

a childhood unspoken. Your wandering eyes on the evening star

and your tired hands in my reluctant hold.

And for once the night isn’t marred by children entwining

and entangling her silent melody with their laughter.

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