Blind date with a poem
For Will
Dear Will,
When it is all said and done, you would have been the one, giving us hope in all our dystopias and all our utopias.
An artist works with illusion in flames, with skies in their cruelty, with a refusing coffin, with a resurrecting defeat that leaves all worlds with a root to forever work with.
Your poems will forever undress us. Everytime we set up our proud altars of a million deaths and their memories, your poems will strip us naked. In that bareness facing your art, we will for the first time see our gutted reflections. I can’t predict the outcome, but I can say it will birth a possibility.
A possibility that will not promise enlightenment, but it will promise an invention that is the womb of all new universes. I can’t predict the nature of the universes, but I can say they will be uncorrupted children of art.
And that is why this is hope. Your poem sitting across us slowly unraveling a playground of existence, slowly untangling its wars and presenting them to us on a palette we cannot ignore. We have no choice but to take its colors and begin our own enquiry. That could take us to a possibility. And that is hope. And that is art. That you are.
We shall intersect again. Until then..
V.P
“Leave the deep well enough bone
dry. Roll up the windows
in flames. The night dusk
is the new noon normal.
The ruined, so far ahead
of the game, laugh.
I’ll wear the air
purifying mask, switch
to piano. If there is
a miracle coming,
I want my name
in the papers.
The cloud herders
direct traffic
to the clogged streets.
We spin the truth,
insert rotisserie spindles
in coffins.
The less than human,
lost humans,
speech patterns
take the breath away.
Hope adapts,
moves like a lung.” — Will Schmit
An ongoing experiment. Join me.
