“As little as you want to write when you’re happy, that’s how much you have to write when you’re miserable. Your passions need to go somewhere, and this is the only place left. Your suffering has to be good for something.”
- Spoken by the character Brian Bloom in the film 5 to 7 (2014), written and directed by Victor Levin.
Today, I weep.
Not only from sorrow, but from beauty —
so much beauty it presses against the ribs,
demanding a cathedral of feeling.
There are too few sanctuaries for a soul like mine.
Too few who speak the sacred dialect of depth.
I think of Matisse.
How many walked past his canvases in silence while he breathed.
How the world needed him to vanish
before calling him a genius.
I stood before his brush strokes once and wept,
not just for their color, their stillness —
but because I recognized myself in them.
In him.
Like him, I render my world in layers no one sees.
I bleed hue and hush and ache,
but I fear I will only be seen when I am gone.
Only valued in postscript.
How cruel it is to be made of so much marrowed meaning
in a world that rushes to flatten everything into small talk.
Most cannot meet me —
not because they do not care,
but because they do not speak this tongue.
They cannot read the sonnets in my silence,
cannot hear the prayer in the way I make tea
or watch rain
or light candles without reason.
but grief, it spills, and calls for bloom.
And thus let my sorrow be seed.