Poets Crucify Themselves

Rating: 10/10 (22 September 2017)

Timber laid at precise angles. Iron bent to uniform curves. A house in an island pasture of a nondescript forest. The entire structure is a single ember away from a reset. Some visit and laugh at the notion of restoring the property, but the headmistress begs to defer. She is the handyman here, and her husband is the social debutante.
Stuck in a barren writer's block, the husband teeters on agitation and belittlement. His wife's encouragement only perpetuates the lie incubating in his head. He has convinced himself that inspiration must come from the outside, slapping away all interior prompts of beauty she graciously crafts for him.
The wife bears the strength between the two, but the husband is the accomplished one. He has fabricated a throne out of his notoriety, and she has scuffed her knees in his presence. She can argue that her contributions dwarf his works, but her audience is only two. Caulking and plumbing are not nearly as transcendent as wordsmithing.
He invites a visitor in when she is begging for time outside of his study. She treads delicately around his creative process, only to see a stranger shamble over their groomed habitation. Immediately at odds with the guest, the wife begins to fight for her husband's elusive attention.
Creation is a messy business. Destruction is a necessity of creation. Revisions only follow painful deletions. We have pinned the kind term "editing" to replace "slaughtering". All great works involve death. Death of precious ideas, or characters, or even real people.
Masterpieces have zero capacity for impartiality. Truth is only good when it is blinding. The couple web together a tale that elicits vomit not applause. He holds the feather, but she breathes the words. Only one name can vacation onto the cover, and the herald chooses incorrectly. The heartbeat coursing through the walls finds a defibrillator in the hands of its betrayer. A mother of revolutionary thought frozen in a Southern Gothic ouroboros.