i was talking with my brothers yesterday and we decided the best way to own a guy who takes off his shirt to fight you is to pick his shirt up and put it on
in 7 years its going to be the 20s again so we can bring back swing music and the aesthetics of that era but keep modern values who’s with me
you can’t repeat the past
can’t repeat the past? why, of course you can! of course you can.
date of origin: 19th of may, 2013.
this is my post. do you know how it feels to have this be your post? do you understand the guilt i have to live with knowing this is my post? the weight on my soul as the decade popped into prominence with spanish flu … 2 !
do you know how it feels, heritageposts? are any of these heritage posts your own or are you just a curator of human misery? do you know how it feels to live knowing that of anything i’ve ever made, anything i’ve ever said, this has been seen by most people, and this will probably remain the case until i die? for this to be my legacy? can you relate? can you empathize?
but do you want to know the worst part? the absolute worst part of all of this?
we haven’t even brought back art deco into mainstream prominence. sickening
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.
–
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?
