Post by Reilley on Mar 18, 2014 11:14:46 GMT -6
To celebrate my recent poem "So Far From Me" being published in the Spring 2014 Boston Literary Magazine, I'd like to share with you all the first poem I had published in that wonderful journal from the Fall of 2010.
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Living the "Art" Life
You say you wish to live your life as if it were Art, do you?
Then you must be willing to sacrifice yourself on the altar.
You must learn to listen intently to the choir of air conditioning
and the slow, languid electric chant of your flesh.
You should watch television with your mother, sadly enough,
while your girlfriend rides in cars with strange men.
You should drink every day, until bad things sprout
from between the cracks in the floorboards of your mind.
You must wear a tattered bathrobe like a carnival tent
and gather hours like found items at a yard sale.
Sometimes, usually in the dead of winter, you must
bawl like a baby at the sound of an alarm clock blinking 4:20.
Everyone will say how much you live for your art,
they will marvel at your dedication and craft,
while you hold your soul in a mason jar, looking inside
to find the miracle trapped in the amber.
Should you persist in this, as only a true artist could,
you would find that there is more, so much more to art
than eating jelly straight from the jar, or cat’s whispers,
or the fluttering of strange pink moths in the winds of your heart.
------
Living the "Art" Life
You say you wish to live your life as if it were Art, do you?
Then you must be willing to sacrifice yourself on the altar.
You must learn to listen intently to the choir of air conditioning
and the slow, languid electric chant of your flesh.
You should watch television with your mother, sadly enough,
while your girlfriend rides in cars with strange men.
You should drink every day, until bad things sprout
from between the cracks in the floorboards of your mind.
You must wear a tattered bathrobe like a carnival tent
and gather hours like found items at a yard sale.
Sometimes, usually in the dead of winter, you must
bawl like a baby at the sound of an alarm clock blinking 4:20.
Everyone will say how much you live for your art,
they will marvel at your dedication and craft,
while you hold your soul in a mason jar, looking inside
to find the miracle trapped in the amber.
Should you persist in this, as only a true artist could,
you would find that there is more, so much more to art
than eating jelly straight from the jar, or cat’s whispers,
or the fluttering of strange pink moths in the winds of your heart.
