It’s all about control

the illusion of freedom

keeping you busy

optimizing your time

Do you feel satisfied?

sophisticated boredom

edited self-esteem

instantaneous contact

networked loneliness

We’ve lost who we were!

unlimited choices

less empirical knowledge

algorithmic propaganda

You’re told what to believe!

delusional actions

collective psychosis

Made easier by isolation!

psychotic breakdown

societal chaos

We’ve become unable

or perhaps unwilling

to think for ourselves

To create art of any kind is an insanity of sorts. If one really thinks about it, the search for beauty in one's creative endeavors is really a waste of time. Why? By itself, art in any of its mediums serves no significant biological or tangible practical purpose worthy of the time, energy, and pain spent in its creation. So, using the cost-benefit analysis so prevalent in good decision making, it becomes clear that the compulsion to create and the corresponding act of creating art runs contrary to a productive use of one's resources and as a result can be considered a wasteful form of madness.

Creativity can exist solely for the purpose of meeting needs. For example, it took creativity to imagine and then build the first shelter that didn't rely on a cave. It didn't need to inspire awe or illicit an emotional response. it just needed to provide shelter from the elements and protection from the cave bears, saber-toothed cats, and packs of wolves that wanted to remind prehistoric man that having an opposable thumb didn't automatically give them the top spot on the food chain. So, why did they decorate their dwellings? Was it out of boredom? Did they use decoration to let other prehistoric people know that one could have a good time if they grunted 867-5309 to Slag, that Neanderthal hussy who was happy to put out for nothing more than a greasy hunk of mammoth and a handful of berries?

No. Decorating the dwelling was done for some other reason than to communicate who was an easy club over the head and drag by the hair into the cave for a rutting. After all, we eventually developed sophisticated written and spoken languages that could concisely proclaim who had been ridden and was enthusiastically willing to be ridden more than the town camel (humped he-he)/donkey/horse etc. These written and spoken forms of communication were much more precise and didn't require the extra energy or time that the abstract thinking art elicits to understand.

So, why did Pope Julius II (who would later invent a frosty creamy, orange flavored drink enjoyed by mall customers everywhere) feel that the Sistine Chapel needed to be embellished and why was he further compelled to pay for it? After all, it would've been more practical to use the money to, oh say, feed widows and orphans, right? Then why did Michelangelo agree to risk his life lying on a rickety scaffolding sixty-eight dizzying feet above the ground to paint the ceiling of this church? Oh sure, the gig paid well, but I guarantee they didn't offer health insurance. It defies logic and supports organized religion's centuries old bad habit of ignoring those it should be helping in favor of showing off.

What about the other mediums? Well...

Literature and Poetry: Do we really need stories? After all, what is a story, but a falsehood born of a fevered imagination? The written word should be shackled in the iron bonds of the truth. More substance and less art should guide what gets written. As to poetry? Seeking a rhythm or a rhyme is simply a waste of time. Say what you mean, mean what you say.

Music: Music is too chaotic and in many cases, it can be dangerous. Being loud and making noise runs contrary to our instincts for survival. Did our prehistoric ancestors belt out, "Everyone Walk the Dinosaur" at the top of their lungs for shits and gruntles? No, it would've scared away their game and announced their presence to predators. In short, if they wanted to eat and not get eaten, silence, not drum solos was required.

Cuisine: Food is fuel. It didn't need to taste good. It just had to keep you alive while keeping parasites at the minimum.

So, why do we waste our time in the mad pursuit of beauty and self-expression? Shouldn't our energies be spent in more concrete, beneficial pursuits? Maybe. However, as a species. our existence defies what seems practical and beneficial. In fact, at our core we are agents of chaos. All that we are defies order and logic. Why have emotions? They get us in trouble and often blind us to what is easier. We are the only species on Earth that creates things in order to destroy other things. We seek to do things simply because we refuse to think that a thing is impossible. Other creatures don't complicate things and accept what is and live within what is known not in what might be possible.

In short, human beings as a species live in a constant state of defiance. To humanity, reason is often unreasonable. Logical limits get pushed or are outright ignored. Emotions send us down unknown and dangerous paths when a more calculated and emotionless perspective would be safer and more productive. Art in all its forms defies reason. Creation of art is often an act of self-destructive absurdity, that to the outside observer appears to take more than it gives. After all, the term, "Starving Artist" exists for a good reason and history is filled with artists who go unappreciated until they've passed through the digestive tracts of their worm grave mates. Still our chaotic nature demands that we nurture an equally chaotic madness that exists in color, sound, taste, and at all degrees of our imaginations. The Cheshire Cat's words continue to ring true, "We are all mad here" and we are wrapped in the madness of both our humanness and the love of and the compulsion to create art that is a symptom of that madness.

Float above

Sea of fog

Suffer in

Emotional bog

Helpless child

Full of fears

Has no hope

Shedded tears

Always thought

It’d never end

Broken spirit

Unable to mend

Persona non grata

Called a liar

Labeled weak

Psychic misfire

Trust no one

Wasted breath

Stuck performing

This living death

Anger consumes

Pent up hatred

Start to realize

Nothing is sacred

Mental scars

Never healed

Time passes

Pain concealed

Growing old

Full of anxiety

Try to fit

Within society

I once heard the battering of drums, the rhythm of a dozen battered, broken, aimless versions of myself stomping along. Uniform blackness. Had taken those like me to my bed, hard, and harder, cruel and cruller. Far too bright, too hot, too blinding in their own sickness that it spun me into a web of far-too-loud bleating, beatings.

But I hear strings now. They spur flowers from the darkest parts of me, like splintering flesh around broken bone. I feel nothing but safe. Constantly cool for a head too hot as my own, in the light of her moon.

We listened raptly as the Captain spoke, madly waving his arms, speaking of the riches awaiting us on the shores beyond the horizon.

New to the ways of the sea, none worried that the ship had no one at the wheel as all were making sure the Captain saw them listening and nodding, all hoping to curry favor and reap the greatest rewards.

We didn't know the Captain had won the boat in a backroom poker game and knew less than any of us about how to sail the ship, having given the boot and the finger to the former captain's crew.

"Bunch of morons," he was heard to say about them.

Miles from land, the boat began to spin. The Captain stopped waving his arms and speaking long enough to wonder aloud, "Who's driving this thing?"

Looking up to the helm, we saw only dancing shadows, and some of us were gripped by fear, its tiny talons having silently yet swiftly snaked within us, relentlessly squeezing, stabbing our hearts and minds as we realized the future he had promised was as solid as the smoke receding before our eyes.

Some nights, in the quiet moments before sleep, he could feel it pressing down on him—an invisible weight, vast and nameless, a thing without form. It wasn’t the weight of worry, nor the heaviness of a burden carried from the day; it was something far more insidious. It was the weight of existence itself, a suffocating truth that had no clear edges, no escape, and no release. The world around him would grow thick, the air itself seeming to thicken, pushing against him from every angle, as if the very space he occupied had become too narrow to breathe in. Even the act of inhaling felt slower, more laborious, as though the gap between breaths was lengthening, dragging him into an inescapable eternity.

It was not a monster, lurking in the shadows of his mind, nor a ghost whispering his name from across the threshold of his thoughts. It was something subtler, something that did not require the presence of a form, but one that filled the silence between moments, creeping into the cracks of his awareness. This presence was not malevolent in a traditional sense. It had no fangs, no claws, no twisted face to strike fear into him. No, it was a quiet thing, a still thing. Yet it was the most terrifying thing he could imagine, because it wasn’t a thing at all. It was an absence, a lack of meaning, a truth that pressed down from all sides, reminding him that there was no exit from his own existence. Not tonight. Not ever.

Death, he realized, would never come. Not now. Not in the future. Not ever. It wasn’t that he feared death—it was that he realized it was no longer a possibility. He was caught in something worse: an endless existence, unmarked by beginnings or endings, untroubled by the merciful release of finality. Death had been promised to the living, to those who fought, who loved, who burned with desire. But what of those who refused to participate? What of the ones who drifted through life like a whisper, unnoticed, unimportant? For them, there was no peace. There was only an ever-tightening grip of time, an eternal stretch of moments that bound him tighter with each passing second.

The ache wasn’t in the promise of death; it was in the absence of it. It was a deeper kind of suffering—a slow, creeping suffocation of the soul. The world had no place for those who did not live fully, those who did not carve out a name for themselves in the chaos of existence. The truth began to settle over him like dust, invisible but everywhere, as pervasive and unyielding as the passage of time. He wasn’t alive. He wasn’t dead. He was something worse, something that didn’t even have the dignity of ending.

A loophole in the cosmic order. A thing too insignificant for erasure. Too unimportant to even be remembered. He had become a man left behind—not forgotten, exactly, but abandoned by the very force that should have taken him, leaving him to rot in the in-between, a lingering shadow of something once human.

But if he wasn’t dead, what was he? The question lingered, unanswered, as he tried to grasp at the thought. The gods couldn’t have simply left him, could they?

He thought of the old alchemists, hunched over their dusty tomes, their hands stained with ink and mercury, searching for the secret to eternal life. They spoke of potions, of blood sacrifices, of dark rituals performed under the pale light of a crescent moon. Perhaps they were wrong, he mused. What if the answer was simpler than they had ever imagined? What if the key to immortality wasn’t the drinking of poison or the sacrificing of lambs? What if the secret lay not in action, but in the passive refusal to live? The rejection of the world’s demands. The denial of participation. No blood, no bargains—just a quiet rot, a failure to live. That, he realized, might be the true curse. A life without death, but not because of some divine mercy. No, because the gods themselves had simply overlooked him.

The elders whispered about him in the dark corners of ancient temples, their voices low, thick with caution. They called him the Forgotten One, a name spoken with the same reverence one would reserve for a curse. He was not a ghost—not in the way the tragic and the lost were. He didn’t belong to the realm of the sorrowful, nor the doomed. No, he was something else, something far worse. He was a shadow in the shape of a man, lingering at the edges of existence, a footnote in the great narrative of life and death, a thing that was neither. They said he had once been a man, flesh and blood like any other. But he had moved through the world like a whisper, unseen, unheard. His footsteps left no mark, his words passed unnoticed. He did not fight, nor love, nor hate. He had neither ambition nor despair. He simply existed, a passive participant in a world that demanded more than mere existence.

And when the Reaper came to collect the souls of the dead, it had missed him. He had been overlooked. Forgotten. Left behind in the cosmic shuffle of things.

So now he lingered.

The world had its laws, its silent, cruel laws. Live fully, love deeply, hurt deeply, rage against the tides, and you will earn your exit. But what of those who did none of those things? What of those who slipped through life unnoticed, who never burned with desire, who never sought to leave a mark on the world? Those who never lived, never fought, never loved, never hated—what of them?

They were not granted the mercy of endings.

The truth continued to weigh on him, pressing down like the slow accumulation of dust. He wasn’t alive, he wasn’t dead. He was simply forgotten—too unimportant to be remembered, too insignificant to be erased. A man caught in the space between, a soul left to rot without ever having had the chance to live. It was a terrible kind of purgatory—one without even the faintest hope of redemption.

And so, he waited. He waited in that vast, empty place where all the forgotten things rotted away. He waited in the space where the gods themselves did not dare to look, where even the force of existence itself dared not venture.

He waited in silence, with nothing but time stretching endlessly before him.

as his stronghold diminishes.

Signals, triggers, and ushers kickstarting debut

of demure "Flora" who slowly but surely attempts

to reveal her true colors in fits and starts,

nevertheless, she displays skittishness,

when sun kissed "Radiance"

(the closest equivalent would be Aglaea

from Greek mythology,

one of the Charites (Graces)

associated with radiant beauty and festive splendor)

dearly fawns upon her,

though as temperatures tick

(tok like a byte dance) upwards,

a preponderant panoply and splash of color

will soon highlight, predominate, and x ist

showcasing the splendiferous,

odiferous, and luminiferous latent potential

conceded courtesy mother nature "Gaia"

housing the pent up

locked energy once dormant

under the frozen terrestrial surface

emergent after celestial seasonal thaw,

which comes trumpeting

and marching when the hills alive

with the sound of music,

where in months to elapse

topiary will come to life

once nondescript hedge rows

sculpted into ornamental animal

via botanical artist wielding

pruning shears and chainsaw

carved, limned and sculpted

with wrist a cratic wrought voila uber

prestidigitation head turning

botanical picturesque Sun

kist animals at an exhibition

transformed miraculously via

Te Deum divine fist bumping,

whence realistic fauna burst

alive with an explosion

of colorful twist and shout of foliage,

where scalloped superfluous,

incredulous, and anomalous

banana rama manna for naturalist

deciduous detritus capacious

carpet boar animation punk

chew waits groundswell.

Liszt ghost would arise from the

grave to produce magnum opus

without a beat missed such

shrubbery mimicking likeness

sans glistening fleshy sin

yew, and gist about ready

to become bone a fide

(green behind ears) thriving vox populist,

per species and genus

wrought thrashing into birth

as delicate craftsman promised

to imbue life, liberty

and pursuit of happiness whittling away

leavings, thus did exist

the nascent then omnipresent visible

entity emerging from cocoon,

an herbalist metamorphosed

from the imagination

of a skilled, practiced and mentalist

conniver viz extracting

the initially obscure blessed beast,

where with august magic

wielding tools of this specialty vis

a vis bringing breathing

manifest destiny ala Pinocchio (trans

formed from wood to flesh),

whereby finest dexterous

chiseling blistering hands

baffle onlookers as coterie of

topiary harvest breathes

mind bogglingly astoundingly

authentic rooted ready

to frolic in grass menagerie,

a gamesome group of linkedin live progeny,

the Michelangelo of dirtiest canvass,

an earthen tabula rasa of sorts,

where application threshing

re: electric cool laid ahs hid

test brings out chlorophyll

doppelganger green hued key luster

incorporating a webbed, wide world

buzzfeeding with a host of organisms

avast vernal renascence

blooming forth when optimal

environmental conditions met

oblivious to whether Gregorian Calendar

indicates the start date

(about twelve weeks after

the northern hemisphere

subjected to hiemal, hibernal,

winterish, or bruma weather)

ecstatic regarding and regaling

March madness Rite of Spring,

when the sun crosses the celestial equator

in a northerly direction,

marking the prime meridian of right ascension

heralding flickering, snapchatting

and twittering Firebird Suite

witnessed amidst flora busting out all over

in all her morning glory

concurrent resultant boom

courtesy the winds of March

whooshing in newlife budding forth

dispersing seeds of life and white lily,

whereby creationists attribute

videre licet pollinators of Eden

given special dispensation, license,

and tithing with gumption

to propagate at the expense

of annihilation, discrimination,

hybridization, marginalization, sanctification,

(and exert dominion - domination

over all creatures great and small,

all things bright and beautiful, and

all things wise and wonderful,

which mandate to be fruitful and multiply)

taken to heart and bestowed,

allotted especial sanctity

to human life reproduction

dogmatic, idiomatic, osmatic

deeds categorically to beget

in obeisance to supposed sacred text

bamboozling, extolling, and foretelling gamut

of various and sundry

diverse creeds, misfit nationalities,

and tribes of man/womankind,

where taint any chance

civilization and their discontents

also known as Homo sapiens will endure

raining ruination upon planet Earth,

where heirs and heiresses

temporarily obscured by

obscenely offensive musky men trumpeting

proclamation ejaculation.

It snaked tighter when he shifted, sliding through the spaces he left open, winding between his ribs, curling where breath should have been. It moved like warmth at first, like something meant to hold him, coil after coil, snug and steady, a presence so familiar he mistook it for comfort.

But love, like this, tightens when you move wrong. When you reach for air.

It didn't strike. No fangs, no venom. Just the slow, patient squeeze. A constriction mistaken for embrace. A grip that convinced him he was safe, even as it stole the air from his lungs.

He let it happen. Thought it was supposed to feel this way. Thought love should press in, reshape him, make him smaller, make him fit inside the space it allowed. But when he tried to breathe deep, to stretch, to move beyond what it had decided he could be—

That was when it reminded him:

It had never been his to hold.

*Trigger warning: abuse*

Your arms snake around the curve of my neck, choking me up, the air leaving my lungs bit by bit as your hold tightens. Fear all of sudden leaves my body and I feel myself relax under your grip. It's only when I'm completely out of oxygen that the panic rises up within me like burning, hot lava. I don't want to die! I writhe and twist against your warm body, trying desperately to wriggle out of your chokehold. Black spots dot my vision, spreading across my line of sight like smudged mascara or perhaps thick black paint as soon as it touches water. Tears burn at the edges of my eyes, the life being sucked out of them with every passing second.

"I'm sorry."

Your useless apology falls upon my ears like a faraway echo of times I'd rather not recall. But I do. I remember every minute of it. I remember it all.

It began with curses under your breath, barely audible to me. Then a push, a bruise, a slap. You no longer remained my lover, instead taking the shape of something monstrous, something I was no longer familiar with; someone who scared me to my core, who made me feel loved at times, but mostly alone.

I should have seen it coming. I should have recognized the looks on my friends' faces, a mixture of horror and disgust when I told them how you pushed me down the stairs because you were too drunk to realize what you were doing. Oh, how I defended you, like my life depended on it. And now look, you're the one taking it away.