"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." - William Faulkner
and you will have to give it back someday,
just not right now. I'll take credit for that
and I'll give it back on a blue Saturday
when things shift just a bit and the weather
makes you remember we're all barreling through
the months, banging into June one moment
and December the next. But I digress. In fact, I only
ever digress. My disasters in love are well
documented but I still get up every morning,
wash my face, and feel closer to something
like a final note in a fucked up symphony. But
that's making more of silence than the ears
can bear the sound of your own feet which
are always and only your own (you live alone).
We get born into the world and perhaps even
come to some vague realization or understanding just in time
for it all to wind down. That's the joke:
you just need to forgive a lot and walk out
into the ocean until you're knee deep in
the churning froth. There you'll find it:
your feet cold, heart racing, nowhere to go but further out,
nothing left to let go of but everything.
Paula Modersohn-Becker Self-Portrait on Her Fifth Wedding Anniversary, 1906 Oil on canvas 39 3/4" x 27 1/2" (101 x 69.9 cm) The Boettcherstrasse Museum, Bremen