EarthSick

Art for people who have survived being alive. Original art, writing, film, dance, and philosophical emergencies by Rock—a multidisciplinary artist from Louisiana. Creator of EARTHSICK and host of MINDSICK.

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START HERE

WELCOME TO EARTHSICK

My name is Corinne Hesson, though most people online know me as Rock. I’m a New Orleans–based multidisciplinary artist, writer, dancer, filmmaker, and the creator of EARTHSICK—an expanding body of work about what it means to remain conscious, creative, and spiritually awake inside a world that is beautiful, violent, absurd, and constantly ending.

This blog is the central nervous system of that work.

EARTHSICK is not one medium, one project, or one polished personal brand. It is a visual and philosophical universe built from original paintings, poetry, personal essays, experimental films, movement, fiction, memoir, cultural criticism, and the occasional transmission sent directly from the edge of an existential crisis.

The work is saturated, psychologically charged, darkly funny, and suspicious of easy answers. I’m interested in bodies that refuse to behave, rooms that remember who suffered inside them, beauty that feels slightly dangerous, and the unbearable fact that we are animals capable of understanding our own disappearance.

WHAT I MAKE

VISUAL ART

I create paintings filled with distorted interiors, radioactive color, strange vegetation, dream architecture, watching objects, and domestic spaces that seem to have developed private lives. My work lives somewhere between expressionism, surrealism, maximalism, memory, and hallucination.

I’m less interested in reproducing what a room looks like than discovering what it knows.

Expect original paintings, details, works in progress, visual experiments, and the larger archive of images shaping the Earthsick world.

POETRY AND WRITING

My writing explores consciousness, trauma, mortality, identity, spirituality, family mythology, cultural failure, and the humiliating persistence of hope.

The poetry is paragraph-driven spoken word: conversational but constructed, raw without becoming careless, and filled with physical objects carrying metaphysical weight. It uses evolving wordplay, surprising internal rhyme, psychological and body horror, uncomfortable humor, and philosophical contradictions that remain unresolved.

There will be no inspirational quote placed gently over the wound.

I am interested in what happens after the usual explanations fail—when survival does not redeem the violence, forgiveness does not produce justice, God does not answer, and tomorrow arrives anyway.

I’m currently developing several major written projects, including ABNORMAL, a memoir-informed work about memory, trauma, family mythology, consciousness, and the unstable process of becoming a person, and TOMORROW, UNFORTUNATELY, a philosophical poetry project asking whether existence is morally defensible—and how anyone remains spiritually open after learning how much suffering the world permits.

MINDSICK

I host MINDSICK, an independently produced philosophical podcast for people who think themselves into corners.

The show explores anxiety, identity, trauma, culture, love, self-sabotage, mortality, spirituality, consciousness, and the human need to make existence mean something. It does not offer ten-step solutions or pretend I’m speaking from a mountaintop. It begins inside the problem.

MINDSICK is for overthinkers, recovering people-pleasers, spiritually curious skeptics, former gifted kids, emotionally overeducated disasters, and anyone who has ever become too aware of their own existence at an inconvenient hour.

MOVEMENT AND FILM

I am also a dancer and experimental filmmaker. I make short films, movement pieces, visual poetry, and strange little narratives that use the body as both subject and evidence.

Movement matters to me because the body remembers what language edits out. It carries history through muscle, posture, pain, hesitation, and the shapes we make when explanation is no longer enough.

WHAT THIS BLOG IS ABOUT

This blog is part gallery, part notebook, part cinema lobby, part evidence locker.

Here you’ll find:

Original art and works in progress

Spoken-word poetry and prose

Philosophical and personal essays

MINDSICK episodes and excerpts

Film and movement projects

Visual research and mood boards

Writing from developing books

Earthsick artifacts, fragments, questions, and beautiful little catastrophes

Other artists and images that make the world feel briefly less dead

The recurring questions are not small ones:

What makes a self?

Does suffering need to mean something?

Can hope exist without becoming denial?

Is forgiveness necessary for freedom?

What does the body know that consciousness refuses to admit?

If everything ends, how should that change the way we live now?

And if existence cannot justify itself, what are we responsible for doing with it?

I don’t expect every post to answer those questions. I distrust answers that arrive too clean. I would rather create work that stays alive inside the contradiction.

WHY FOLLOW?

Follow if you want art with an actual interior life.

Follow if you like saturated color, Southern Gothic atmosphere, surreal rooms, dangerous tenderness, philosophical horror, maximalism, dream logic, punk energy, spiritual uncertainty, and writing that refuses to treat suffering as a branding opportunity.

Follow if you are tired of being told that every wound was a lesson, every ending was meant to happen, and every failure to flourish under impossible conditions represents a personal defect.

Follow if you want to watch an artist build an entire creative universe in public—painting by painting, poem by poem, episode by episode, and terrible idea by terrible idea until some of them become beautiful.

This is not a lifestyle blog selling the fantasy of a completed person.

I am not completed.

Neither is the work.

That is the point.

EARTHSICK is for anyone trying to remain soft without becoming defenseless, critical without becoming numb, hopeful without lying, and alive without pretending that survival answers every question.

FIND ME ELSEWHERE

Instagram: @e4rthsivk Original art, movement, films, works in progress, and the wider visual world.

Pinterest: The Earthsick visual archive Original work, dream architecture, garments for the end times, Southern Gothic references, visual research, and evidence from the collective unconscious.

Podcast: Listen to MINDSICK on Spotify Consciousness, anxiety, meaning, death, identity, trauma, love, and whatever else keeps the brain pacing after midnight.

ONE LAST THING

I believe art should do more than decorate the room.

It should alter the pressure inside it.

It should make the familiar briefly unrecognizable. It should disturb the lie before offering comfort. It should create evidence that another person stood inside the same impossible question and refused to look away.

That is what I’m building here.

Welcome to EARTHSICK.

The world is ending. It has always been ending.

We still have things to make.

#EARTHSICK #artists on tumblr #writers on tumblr #original art #original writing #multidisciplinary artist #contemporary art #surreal art #spoken word poetry #existentialism #philosophy #experimental film #independent podcast #New Orleans artist #artist introduction

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Original Paintings by Corinne Hesson

I paint things the way they remember me, not the way I remember them.

More from EARTHSICK: Art + films: Instagram Visual archive: Pinterest Existential spiraling: MINDSICK

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Haiku, I-III

I

The flowers grew teeth beneath a radioactive sun— still, I touched the pink.

II

The world ends slowly. I paint the walls ultraviolet. Let ruin look back.

III

God left the room warm. Something breathing in the walls dreams us into bloom.

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I KEEP MAKING THINGS LIKE THE WORLD IS LISTENING

I woke up already late for a life I do not remember agreeing to, which is how most mornings begin. The alarm went off, my stomach objected to consciousness, somebody somewhere was profiting from a disaster, and the light coming through the blinds was so beautiful I briefly forgave existence for being organized this way. That is the trap. The world keeps committing atrocities and then growing flowers near them. It knows I am visually motivated. It knows exactly how much pink to put in the sky before I start reconsidering my case.

I have spent years trying to become a person as though personhood were a final draft. I kept waiting to feel consistent, healed, recognizable from every angle. Instead I have become a crowded little country with several competing governments. The teacher wants everyone fed. The artist wants to set the table on fire because the flames match the curtains. The child is still hiding evidence under her bed. The woman I am becoming keeps arriving in inappropriate shoes and refusing to explain herself.

People ask what kind of art I make, and I never know how to say that I am trying to paint the sensation of remembering something incorrectly. I want rooms to look back. I want colors loud enough to interrupt a family secret. I want the flowers to appear medicinal, the furniture slightly complicit, the house beautiful in the way a venomous animal is beautiful. Realism has never seemed particularly realistic to me. The visible world is only the alibi reality gives when somebody asks where it was.

Writing is worse because language pretends to be civilized. You arrange the correct words in the correct order and suddenly the breakdown has margins. The grief receives punctuation. The unspeakable becomes twelve-point font and waits politely to be reviewed. I do not know whether this is transformation or taxidermy. I only know that when I put the thing on the page, it stops running loose through the house for a little while.

I am suspicious of any philosophy that looks good printed on a beige mug. I do not believe everything happens for a reason, although everything certainly happens because of something, and human beings have built entire religions around confusing those two statements. I do not believe pain automatically improves us. Sometimes it makes us cruel. Sometimes it makes us funny. Sometimes it ruins our posture and gives us a very specific relationship with locked doors. Whatever beauty we create afterward belongs to us—not to the thing that tried to destroy us.

Still, I cannot commit fully to despair because despair is too confident. It claims to know how the story ends, and I have already survived several endings written by unreliable narrators. I have watched children draw smiling suns over houses they did not feel safe inside. I have watched the body keep dancing after the mind declared the building condemned. I have loved people badly, been loved imperfectly, made art in rooms where I once believed nothing new could happen. None of that proves the universe is good. It does prove the universe has not succeeded in becoming simple.

That may be what EARTHSICK means to me: loving the world without acquitting it. Remaining spiritually curious without volunteering to be lied to. Making beauty that does not conceal the damage beneath it, but presses its face close to the wound and asks what color it remembers. I want tenderness with teeth. Hope with its criminal record attached. Art that understands survival is not a happy ending—it is merely the unsettling discovery that the story still has access to your body.

So I keep painting. I keep writing. I dance because the body deserves to make one decision the mind cannot footnote. I speak into microphones as though consciousness might finally confess if I keep it talking long enough. I make things because making is the closest I have come to answering existence without pretending I understood the question.

The world is ending, yes. It has been ending for everyone who has ever lived.

But it is also unfinished.

Unfortunately for despair, so am I.

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MINDSICK PODCAST

EVERYTHING ENDS… NOW WHAT?

We spend most of our lives behaving as though death is an administrative problem we can postpone by staying busy.

We make plans for later. We wait to feel ready. We promise ourselves we’ll begin living properly once we become healthier, calmer, more successful, less afraid, easier to love. Meanwhile, life continues happening in the background—quietly spending the time we thought we were saving.

But everything ends.

Relationships end. Childhood ends. Bodies change. Homes disappear. People leave before we understand what they meant to us. Even the version of you reading this sentence will eventually become someone you remember being.

So what are we supposed to do with that?

In this episode of MINDSICK, I explore mortality, impermanence, grief, spirituality, and the strange human habit of postponing our own lives. Not as an argument for reckless living or forced positivity, but as an invitation to become more intimate with the fact that none of this is permanent.

Because impermanence is not only what takes meaning away.

It may be what gives meaning its shape.

A sunset matters because it ends. A conversation becomes precious because there will be a final one. Love does not become meaningless because it cannot last forever. If anything, its limits are what make our attention matter.

This episode is also about spirituality—not as certainty, doctrine, or pretending every tragedy serves a hidden purpose, but as the search for connection inside a life we cannot fully explain. Nobody actually knows what is happening here. Some people are simply wearing nicer shoes while being confused.

Maybe the goal is not to solve the mystery.

Maybe it is to participate in it.

To love without guarantees. To create without knowing whether the work will survive us. To plant something we may never see fully grown. To sit in silence long enough to notice that silence was never empty. To stop treating the present like a waiting room for the life we intend to begin later.

Mortality is frightening because it means we will lose everything.

Mortality is meaningful because, for one brief and astonishing moment, we were allowed to have anything at all.

The world is ending. It has always been ending. Have you eaten today? Have you called the person? Have you made the thing? Have you looked closely at your own life before it becomes a story somebody else tells about you?

This is not the rehearsal.

Everything ends. Now what?

Listen to MINDSICK on Spotify.

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NOTHING GUARANTEES THE GENTLE HAND

I have been thinking about how badly we want innocence from the things that keep us alive. We want the body to be wise, hope to be honest, love to be harmless, and tomorrow to arrive carrying proof that continuing was the correct decision. But nothing stays innocent once examined closely enough. The body protects and imprisons. Hope creates and conceals. Even love can place its hands around a dying thing and refuse to let death finish its sentence.

Maybe the mistake is expecting life to justify itself before we participate in it. We keep waiting for existence to present a coherent argument, but existence behaves more like weather than philosophy. It destroys one house, waters another field, and never appears in court. We can call that cruelty, chance, God, physics, or Tuesday, but the ruined house remains ruined. A name may help us point toward the event, though it cannot make the event answer.

I used to imagine healing as a courtroom where every memory would eventually testify and the truth would receive a clean verdict. Now I think healing may be the moment we stop asking the past to become morally intelligent. The past cannot understand what it did because understanding happens only in the living. It cannot apologize, learn, or become ashamed. We are the ones forced to develop a conscience around something that never had one, which may be why recovery often feels less like justice and more like cleaning up after a god.

The strangest part is that there may be no single self performing this work. There are only versions of us exchanging custody of the body. The child preserves the evidence, the wounded self guards it, the artist rearranges it, and the future self keeps making promises she may not survive long enough to fulfill. We call their argument a personality because committee meeting sounds too exhausting. Perhaps becoming whole is not making them agree, but refusing to let the loudest version declare herself the only person who was ever real.

Meaning enters when the room becomes too crowded. It organizes the chairs, labels the evidence, and offers everyone a reason they had to be there. Sometimes this prevents chaos; sometimes it turns the crime scene into a classroom and asks the injured person to be grateful for the education. I no longer believe suffering contains a lesson like a prize inside a cereal box. Whatever wisdom emerges was made by the person who suffered, and the wound should not receive credit for the architecture built around it.

This leaves connection, which feels smaller than cosmic unity but more honest. I cannot become another person’s pain, and pretending I can may only replace their reality with my imagination. What I can do is believe them when their pain contradicts my comfort. I can choose not to make their wound explain itself before I help hold it closed. Maybe compassion is not feeling the same thing; maybe it is accepting that difference does not excuse abandonment.

So I am no longer asking whether the world deserves forgiveness, whether God deserves employment, or whether being alive is evidence in its own defense. I am asking what becomes possible when nothing guarantees the gentle hand. If mercy is not built into the universe, then every act of mercy is a human invention, which makes it fragile but not false. If tomorrow carries no purpose, then purpose becomes something we practice rather than discover. And if existence refuses to tell us what we are doing here, perhaps the most dangerous response is to become an answer it did not know how to give.

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POETRY: Explained...Again

WHAT WE DO WHEN THE ANSWERS FAIL: NOTES FROM THE SECOND HALF

The final five poems move away from asking whether survival is inherently meaningful and toward a more dangerous question: if no meaning arrives from outside us, what are we responsible for creating—and what must we refuse to excuse?

The first half destabilized survival, surrender, the body, God, and hope. The second half removes the structures we normally use to organize what happened afterward. Forgiveness fails to produce justice. Identity fails to remain singular. Suffering fails to reveal a lesson. Spiritual unity fails to explain cruelty. Tomorrow fails to arrive with an answer.

What remains is not nihilism. It is responsibility without reassurance.

In “A Better Person Would Have Forgiven You,” forgiveness becomes morally unstable. We often describe it as liberation, but that language can conceal a social demand: the wounded person must complete the emotional labor that allows everyone else to stop feeling uncomfortable. The person who broke the glass disappears while the person walking through it is praised for learning how to bleed quietly.

The poem refuses that performance. It argues that healing does not require acquittal and that understanding another person’s damage does not erase the damage they caused. But it also refuses to romanticize resentment. Anger can defend the wound until defense becomes preservation. Hatred promises distance while building the offender a permanent room inside the person they harmed.

That creates the poem’s central contradiction: forgiveness and resentment appear to be opposites, but both can become ways of remaining psychologically attached to the person who hurt us. One preserves the relationship by absolving it. The other preserves it by continuing the trial forever. Freedom may require neither forgiveness nor revenge, but something more difficult—the decision to stop allowing the wound to carry the offender’s name.

“I Met Every Version of Myself at the Hospital” turns that conflict inward. Instead of one stable self processing the past, the poem imagines identity as a waiting room crowded with competing selves. The child, the teenager, the patient, the liar, the artist, and the woman who survived all answer to the same name without agreeing on what that name means.

Each version claims a different source of legitimacy. The child believes the first self must be the truest. The wounded self believes pain makes her authentic. The artist believes experience becomes valuable when it can be transformed. The body refuses the argument entirely and continues beating beneath it.

The hospital setting matters because institutions require identity to be administratively simple. A bracelet needs one name. A chart needs one patient. A chair can hold one body. But consciousness is not administratively simple. We are inhabited by former selves who have died, future selves invented as survival mechanisms, and unlived selves who still resent us for the decisions that prevented their existence.

The poem appears to move toward integration when all these selves walk through the door together, but the final image interrupts that comfort: there is only one chair. Integration sounds beautiful until incompatible versions of the self must decide who gets to sit down. Healing may not mean making every version agree. It may mean accepting that no single version has the authority to declare the others symptoms.

In “The Universe Is Not a Lesson Plan,” the need for meaning becomes the object under suspicion. Human beings struggle to accept suffering that produces no revelation, so we convert pain into education. Wounds become teachers. Survival becomes graduation. Trauma becomes the tuition paid for wisdom.

This can be useful. Meaning gives suffering somewhere to sit. It allows a person to arrange unbearable events into a story with sequence, consequence, and direction. But usefulness does not make an interpretation true, and a story can become dangerous when it begins justifying the violence that created it.

If every wound must become wisdom, then the knife gets to call itself an artist.

The poem therefore separates growth from necessity. A person may grow after being harmed without claiming they needed the harm. They may build from wreckage without thanking the bomb. This distinction protects the survivor’s agency without redeeming the source of their suffering.

But rejecting cosmic meaning creates another problem. If the universe provides no lesson, purpose, or answer key, then human beings must decide what their experiences mean. Freedom becomes unpaid labor. We are responsible for making meaning while remaining honest enough not to pretend that what we create was hidden inside the suffering all along.

“If We Are All One, Explain the Knife” subjects spiritual unity to the same interrogation. The idea that every person is part of one consciousness can produce compassion, but it can also blur moral responsibility. If the person who harms and the person harmed are manifestations of the same divine whole, violence risks becoming a mysterious act of cosmic self-interaction rather than a choice with a victim and an offender.

The poem refuses the belief that understanding someone’s pain automatically absolves the pain they inflict. The bruise does not disappear because the fist had a childhood. Compassion without accountability becomes another method of asking the wounded to disappear.

But complete separation is equally unbearable. If each consciousness is permanently sealed inside its own body, then nobody can ever truly experience another person’s suffering. Empathy becomes an imaginative act performed across a distance that cannot be closed.

The poem finally replaces guaranteed unity with chosen connection. We may not be one ocean. We may be separate vessels capable of spilling into one another when the room begins to shake. This makes kindness more significant because it is neither automatic nor cosmically assured. Mercy becomes an animal interrupting its appetite. Compassion becomes a hand choosing to release the weapon even though nothing in the structure of the universe forces it to do so.

“Tomorrow, Unfortunately” gathers every failed answer and asks what remains after their collapse. Survival is not automatically sacred. Pain does not necessarily contain purpose. God does not explain the evidence. Hope cannot promise acquittal. Oneness cannot dissolve the knife. Identity cannot settle into one coherent witness.

Tomorrow arrives anyway.

This continuation is both the horror and the mercy at the center of the poem. The world continues after catastrophe, which means suffering does not stop time. But continuation also means catastrophe does not possess all remaining time. The same indifference that allows the universe to continue after devastation allows the devastated person to continue beyond it.

The speaker does not choose life because she has proved that existence is good. She chooses to get up without resolving the case. This is not optimism. It is an ethical commitment made under conditions of uncertainty.

The future self who was supposed to arrive with a revelation never comes. Instead, the present self returns carrying water, medication, and company. The poem replaces salvation with presence: not repairing the suffering, explaining it, or transforming it into beauty, but refusing to abandon the person experiencing it.

Across these five poems, the argument moves through:

forgiveness → identity → meaning → connection → responsibility

Each concept fails in its idealized form. Forgiveness cannot guarantee freedom. Identity cannot guarantee coherence. Meaning cannot redeem suffering. Spirituality cannot explain cruelty. Tomorrow cannot prove that life is worth living.

Yet none of them becomes worthless.

Forgiveness fails, but release remains possible. Identity fractures, but the selves can still walk through the door together. Meaning is manufactured, but truth can guide what we make. Oneness collapses, but connection can still be chosen. Tomorrow offers no explanation, but it offers another opportunity to respond.

That may be the final danger of the series: once every divine, psychological, and philosophical excuse has been removed, we are left with our own hands.

The hand can hold the knife.

The hand can stop the bleeding.

Nothing guarantees which one we will choose.

That is why the choice matters.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

TOMORROW, UNFORTUNATELY

Tomorrow arrived without defending itself.

No sunrise spilling gold across the floor. No bird outside the window auditioning for symbolism. Just the alarm going off beside a glass of old water and my body beginning another shift at the factory of me.

I had questions.

I wanted to know whether existence was morally defensible. Whether beauty could testify without being bribed. Whether one good morning could cross-examine a century of graves. Tomorrow checked its watch.

Apparently, being alive is not the same as receiving an explanation.

I searched anyway. I looked inside the body and found an animal refusing my authority. I looked inside suffering and found no lesson waiting to be learned. I looked inside hope and found denial wearing the same bright shirt. I looked for God and found a set of warm, wet keys in my hand.

I asked the past to apologize.

The past has no mouth.

I asked the universe what all this meant.

The universe has mouths everywhere and somehow that was worse.

So I made meaning. Badly at first. Desperately. I stacked my worst days into a staircase and called the height perspective. I called scars proof. Called survival strength. Called pain a teacher because saying this happened for nothing made nothing feel too powerful.

But meaning can become another way to obey what hurt you.

If every wound must become wisdom, the knife gets to call itself an artist.

No.

Some pain is only pain.

Some dead things should stay dead.

Some rooms should be left with the mirrors still lying.

Some people will never be forgiven, and the world will continue turning without the paperwork.

That is the horror: everything continues.

That is the mercy: everything continues.

The sunflower opens inside the same world that invented concrete. The child draws the sun above a house with no door. One hand holds the knife. Another presses down to stop the bleeding. None of these cancel each other. The universe does not balance its books. It spills everything across the table and leaves before the check arrives.

We are the ones who stay.

Not forever.

Just long enough to become responsible.

I used to think responsibility meant finding a reason to live. A calling. A destiny. Some beautiful future version of me reaching backward through time, promising the body on the bathroom floor that all of this would one day make sense.

She never came.

I came.

Older. Angrier. Carrying no revelation. Just water, medication, and enough strength to sit beside myself without turning the moment into a metaphor.

Maybe that is what saved me.

Not hope.

Company.

The decision to remain near what I could not repair.

I still do not know whether life is good. Anyone who says it is has ignored too much. Anyone who says it is not has ignored something too. I have seen suffering too senseless to forgive and tenderness too deliberate to dismiss.

The evidence is contaminated.

The jury is made of meat.

God has stopped returning my calls.

And tomorrow keeps arriving like a witness nobody remembers summoning.

Unfortunately, it has seen everything.

Unfortunately, it says the trial is not over.

Unfortunately, I am still here to hear it.

So I get up.

Not because survival is sacred. Not because pain had purpose. Not because the universe loves me, or because I have learned to love it back.

I get up because the world has not finished asking what I will do with it.

And I have not finished becoming dangerous to everything that taught me disappearance was the same thing as peace.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

IF WE ARE ALL ONE, EXPLAIN THE KNIFE

I used to say we are all one because it made the world feel held. One soul, many bodies. One ocean rehearsing itself as rain, river, blood. Every stranger another window in the same burning house.

It sounded beautiful.

Beauty has covered for worse ideas.

If we are all one, explain the knife. Explain why one hand closes around the handle while another body opens. Explain what kind of unity requires an entrance wound.

People say hurting you is hurting myself, but clearly some parts of the self have excellent pain management. The hand does not scream when the blade enters someone else. The mouth goes home clean. The wound is left to study philosophy.

Maybe cruelty is the universe discovering where it does not have nerves.

I have watched people turn oneness into an alibi. They say the person who hurt you was hurt too. That everyone is acting from their wounds. That forgiveness is simply the left hand realizing the right hand did not mean to strike.

But the bruise does not disappear because the fist had a childhood.

Understanding is not absolution. A map of the fire is not a bucket of water. You can know exactly where the flame began and still demand that it stop consuming the house.

Then there is God.

If God is everything, God is not only the sunflower. God is the concrete. God is the child and the cancer multiplying inside her. God is the prayer, the silence after it, the doctor looking down at the floor.

Call that mystery if you need to.

I call it an accusation.

Either God stands outside suffering and permits it, or God lives inside suffering and performs it. Either the universe watches the wound, or the universe is the wound watching itself.

I do not know which is worse.

Still, separation has its own violence. If we are truly alone inside our bodies, then empathy is a beautiful hallucination. Your pain can never enter me. I can stand beside the worst moment of your life and remain physically untouched.

Maybe that is why we invented oneness.

Not because it is true, but because loneliness needed a religion.

And yet—

when you cry, something in my chest misbehaves. When a stranger falls, my hands move before philosophy approves the expense. When the blade enters you, I cannot feel the cut, but I know where I would bleed.

What is that?

Not proof. Not God. Not one soul wearing eight billion faces.

Something less complete.

Something with borders.

Maybe we are not one ocean. Maybe we are separate cups carried through the same shaking room, spilling into one another whenever the floor gives way.

That would mean connection is not guaranteed.

It is chosen.

It can fail.

It can be refused.

Which makes kindness more frightening, not less. If compassion is not the universe recognizing itself, then every act of mercy is an animal interrupting its own appetite. A hand loosening around the handle. A mouth deciding not to become a weapon.

I no longer say we are all one.

I say we are capable of reaching across what keeps us separate.

Sometimes.

Not always.

Never enough.

The knife is real. The wound is real. The distance between bodies is real.

So is the hand that presses down to stop the bleeding.

I do not know if that makes us holy.

I only know holiness means less if it cannot be refused.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

THE UNIVERSE IS NOT A LESSON PLAN

Something bad happens and everybody becomes a substitute teacher.

They arrive carrying worksheets. What did this teach you? How did it make you stronger? Who are you now that the worst thing has happened? As if suffering is a school we applied to. As if the body lying facedown on the bathroom floor is simply completing an advanced course in character development.

I would like to speak to the principal.

I would like to know why the curriculum includes children burying parents, parents burying children, and people learning the precise weight of an empty chair. I would like to know what educational standard is satisfied by terror. I would like to see the research proving grief improves test scores.

They say everything happens for a reason.

So does food poisoning.

A reason is only a cause wearing a necktie. The storm happened because pressure changed. The glass broke because it fell. He hurt you because he chose to. None of this becomes holy because we cannot tolerate an unfinished sentence.

But meaning is seductive.

It takes the knife from the wound, polishes the handle, and displays it above the fireplace. Look what made me. Never mind that the knife did not intend to sculpt. Never mind how much of you was cut away and called progress.

I have done it too. Turned disaster into narrative before the blood dried. Arranged the worst days into constellations, drawing lines between unrelated fires until they resembled a destiny. Pain became plot. Plot became purpose. Purpose became the price of admission to my own life.

It helped.

That is what makes it dangerous.

A useful lie is harder to kill than a useless truth. If I say my suffering meant nothing, I risk falling through the floor. If I say it made me who I am, I have to thank it for the introduction.

Maybe meaning does not redeem pain.

Maybe it only gives pain somewhere to sit.

A chair. A name card. A small paper cup of water. We invite it to the table because leaving it outside does not make it leave. Then years later, we forget it was a guest and start calling it family.

I do not believe the universe planned my suffering. The universe can barely keep its stars from exploding. It is not a teacher. It does not grade fairly. It does not stay after class to explain why some people received a future and others became an example.

But if nothing means anything on its own, then meaning becomes our responsibility.

And I hate that.

I wanted purpose to be discovered, not manufactured. I wanted to dig through the wreckage and find a little golden answer stamped THIS WAS WORTH IT. Instead, there is only wreckage and my own hands deciding what can still be built.

That is not redemption.

Redemption would make the suffering necessary.

This is something smaller and more insulting: agency.

The freedom to make meaning is also the obligation to make it without lying. To say I grew without saying I needed to be broken. To say I survived without calling survival the reason it happened. To build a life from the ruins without thanking the bomb.

The universe is not a lesson plan.

There may be no test.

No grade.

No teacher coming back with the answer key.

Just us, passing notes in the dark, trying to tell one another what we saw.

And sometimes the note says nothing profound.

Sometimes it only says:

This hurt.

It should not have happened.

I am still here.

That is not meaning.

But it is true.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

I MET EVERY VERSION OF MYSELF AT THE HOSPITAL

I met every version of myself beneath fluorescent lights. They were all wearing the same paper bracelet, which felt insulting. As if a name and a date of birth could keep us from becoming each other. As if identity were not just a clerical error the body keeps correcting.

The child arrived first. She still believed adults became good when they became sorry. She carried a drawing of a house with smoke coming from the chimney, though I could not tell whether that meant warmth or warning. I asked why she gave the house so many windows. She said, so someone will see me.

The teenager sat farthest from the door. All eyeliner, bitten nails, and emergency exits. She had already learned that pain becomes embarrassing when it lasts longer than other people’s sympathy. She called me a sellout for surviving. I called her dramatic, which was cruel, because drama was the only language anyone noticed her speaking.

Then came the woman who almost died.

She did not look wise. Near-death had not made her luminous. She was wearing hospital socks and holding a paper cup of medication like the world’s smallest surrender. When I asked what she had learned, she said, Nothing. It hurt.

That frightened me more than any revelation could have.

I had been counting on meaning to arrive retroactively. I thought one day the worst things would organize themselves into a staircase and I would climb them toward the person I was always supposed to become. Instead, they remained what they were: broken boards, rusted nails, pieces of a structure nobody had finished building.

More versions entered. The liar. The daughter. The teacher. The patient. The artist who turns blood into language and then worries she has made it look too beautiful. The future self I invented to survive the present stood beside a version of me who had done everything right and was still unhappy.

We began arguing over who was real.

The child said the first version.

The teenager said the most wounded.

The artist said whichever one could make the suffering useful.

The body, from somewhere beneath all of us, said nothing. It just kept the heart moving from room to room.

Maybe identity is not a soul. Maybe it is a waiting room full of strangers answering to the same mispronounced name. Some are called before they are ready. Some leave before the doctor arrives. Some have been dead for years and still complain about the magazines.

When the nurse finally opened the door, every version of me stood.

That is the terrible part.

Every version believed she was the patient.

Every version believed the others were symptoms.

The nurse looked at the chart, then looked at us. Which one of you is Corinne?

Nobody answered.

Not because we did not know.

Because we all did.

The child took my hand. The teenager rolled her eyes and took the other. The woman who almost died held the door open.

We walked through together, which sounds like healing if you end the story there.

I do not.

Inside the examination room, there was one chair.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

A BETTER PERSON WOULD HAVE FORGIVEN YOU

A better person would have forgiven you by now. I know because several worse people have told me so. They say forgiveness is a gift you give yourself, which is convenient, because it means nobody has to buy me anything. You break the glass. I sweep the floor. Then everyone applauds when I stop mentioning why my feet are bleeding.

I tried to forgive you correctly. I wrote letters I did not send. Burned them in a bowl. Watched smoke carry my anger toward a God who has never provided a tracking number. I said I release you until release became rehearse, became reverse, became me walking backward through the same locked door.

People love forgiveness because it makes pain presentable. Anger has bad table manners. Grief talks too long. But forgiveness arrives dressed in white and assures the room that nobody will be held responsible for ruining dinner.

They wanted me healed, but what they meant was quiet.

So I kept my anger.

Fed it every version of the story. Gave it your chair at the table, your side of the bed, your voice inside my head. I thought hatred would keep you away, but hatred is a house built for someone you never wanted living in you.

You moved in anyway.

Soon I could predict what you would say because I was saying it for you. I could feel your hands in rooms you had never entered. I had preserved you perfectly, pickled in fury, safe from consequence and impossible to forget.

Maybe resentment is not the opposite of forgiveness.

Maybe both are ways of staying in the relationship.

One says what you did no longer owns me. The other says what you did must never stop mattering. Both keep your name in their mouths. Both wake up facing the same old courtroom, waiting for a verdict from someone who fled before the trial.

I do not want revenge. I want the past to develop a conscience. I want the moment to reopen, look at what it made of me, and feel ashamed.

But time has no nervous system.

The past cannot apologize.

It cannot even die. It just keeps losing witnesses.

So no, I do not forgive you. Not today. Maybe not ever. I refuse to turn my wound into your clean exit.

But I am learning to stop calling the wound by your name.

I am learning that healing does not require acquittal. That I can put down the knife without handing it back. That some doors should remain locked—not because something dangerous is outside, but because I am finally leaving the house.

A better person might forgive you.

I am trying to become someone you no longer get to describe.

[earthsickworld]

THE HEART VOTES BEFORE THE MIND

I keep wondering why we treat survival like a verdict. As if continuing automatically proves that life was right to continue. The heart beats and we call that hope, but the heart does not know what hope is. It only knows electricity, pressure, the old animal order to keep the blood moving. Maybe that is why being alive can feel so humiliating: the body keeps voting for tomorrow before the mind has even seen the ballot.

We love anything that grows somewhere hostile because it lets us believe hostility is useful. A flower through concrete becomes an inspirational photograph, and suddenly nobody is asking why we paved over the field. We make saints out of people who endure what should have destroyed them, then use their survival to excuse the conditions that required it. Strength becomes a compliment with a hidden command inside it: keep carrying what we refuse to help you hold. Even admiration can be a way of abandoning someone beautifully.

But I distrust surrender too. There is a difference between releasing something and teaching yourself not to want it. There is a difference between peace and the exhaustion that finally stops screaming. Sometimes we bury a dream because it is dead, and sometimes we bury it because everyone around us is tired of hearing it breathe. The grave looks identical from above. Only the person holding the shovel knows whether this is mercy or murder, and sometimes even they cannot tell.

The self is another thing I am no longer convinced exists in the way we advertise it. I say my body as if I purchased it, as if there is a clean little owner sitting behind my eyes. But the body panics without me, heals around me, and manufactures desires I later have to defend in court. Memory edits the footage, language writes the captions, and identity walks in afterward pretending it directed the film. Maybe a person is not a single being but a temporary peace treaty between several animals who all learned the same name.

God becomes difficult once the name stops working. It is easy to believe in a universe that loves you when love means eventually, mysteriously, invisibly. Any silence can be called a plan if the plan is large enough to swallow the evidence. But removing God does not make the room less haunted; it only removes the person we intended to question. Then every unanswered prayer becomes an unopened message sitting in the human inbox, and suddenly divine absence looks frighteningly similar to our own.

Hope enters wearing the same clothes as denial, which is inconvenient because I have loved them both. They both say tomorrow before tomorrow has consented to exist. They both place a hand on the wound and insist there is more to the story, though one means the wound can heal and the other means we should stop mentioning the blood. Perhaps hope is not the belief that everything will improve. Perhaps it is the refusal to let suffering become the only accurate thing about us.

I do not know whether existence is good, and I no longer trust anyone who answers quickly. Life contains too much beauty to dismiss and too much horror to praise without qualification. Maybe the task is not to forgive the world or condemn it, but to remain awake inside the contradiction without turning numbness into wisdom. To make something tender without pretending tenderness wins. To keep one small part of ourselves unconverted—to pain, to power, to the seductive simplicity of despair—and call that unfinished resistance a soul.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY: Explained by the Poet

WHAT SURVIVES US: NOTES FROM THE HALFWAY POINT

Is survival actually good—or is it simply what living things do?

We speak about survival as if it carries its own moral meaning. The sunflower breaks through concrete, the wounded body seals itself, the abandoned room keeps our fingerprints, and morning arrives whether or not anyone inside the house wanted another day. We witness persistence and call it beautiful because beauty makes endurance easier to look at.

But survival is not proof that the conditions were acceptable.

A flower growing through pavement does not forgive the pavement. A body healing does not redeem what injured it. A person continuing to live does not retroactively transform their suffering into a necessary lesson. Sometimes survival is courageous. Sometimes it is cellular. Sometimes it happens beneath our consent, performed by a body that keeps dragging us toward tomorrow while the conscious mind is still deciding whether tomorrow deserves us.

That distinction matters to me.

We have built an entire culture around turning pain into evidence of personal growth. Every wound must become wisdom. Every disaster must reveal a hidden purpose. Every person who survives must eventually stand in good lighting and explain why they are grateful it happened.

It is a beautiful system—for everyone except the person who was hurt.

It allows us to admire the survivor without indicting what they survived.

That is why the poems keep resisting easy transformation. They are interested in what happens when survival does not make someone better, only present. When the body remains alive but the meaning refuses to arrive. When hope begins to resemble denial. When persistence stops being heroic and becomes a hostage situation.

In “The Things We Leave in Rooms,” identity survives through objects. The bed holds a body’s shape. The mirror steals a face. The room becomes an archive of a person who has left—but remembering is not necessarily an act of love. A place can preserve the version of you that suffered there long after you have fought to become someone else. Memory becomes both evidence and captivity.

Then “Everything Wants to Live” turns toward the sunflower breaking through concrete. It is tempting to call the flower triumphant, but that interpretation makes the concrete disappear. We celebrate what survived so intensely that we stop questioning what required survival in the first place.

“Some Things Should Be Allowed to Die” contradicts that instinct. If life is sacred, when does keeping something alive become cruel? We resuscitate relationships, identities, beliefs, and futures long after they have become uninhabitable. We call this loyalty. We call it patience. We call it hope because control sounds kinder with flowers around it.

Perhaps one of adulthood’s most brutal responsibilities is learning that preservation and love are not synonyms.

Sometimes love waters the plant.

Sometimes love admits it is dead.

Then the question moves inward. “My Body Has Never Heard of Me” treats the body not as a faithful vessel but as an animal operating beneath identity. It panics without permission, heals without gratitude, desires without consulting our values, and eventually begins the process of becoming earth. The body protects us, but it does not belong to us in the way we pretend. Consciousness may be less like a captain and more like a frightened passenger narrating the weather.

That destabilizes the idea of the self. If the body acts without “me,” where exactly am I? Am I the thoughts? The flesh producing them? The story connecting both? Or am I simply the temporary argument occurring between an animal and its reflection?

Once the self becomes unstable, God does too.

In “I Fired God for Poor Performance,” God is accused of negligence. Free will cannot explain hurricanes. A larger plan cannot return a dead child to their body. Any theology that converts suffering into divine necessity risks making cruelty sacred.

But removing God does not remove the suffering.

It removes the defendant.

Without God, there is no cosmic authority to blame, beg, or forgive. There is only us—and the unbearable possibility that responsibility was the thing hiding beneath prayer. A godless world might free humanity from divine judgment, but it also leaves no higher power responsible for feeding the hungry, stopping the violence, or answering the cries we can clearly hear.

Then the children draw the sun.

“The Children Drew the Sun Anyway” asks whether hope is ignorance, resistance, or an early form of authorship. The children know the world is frightening. They draw storms, graves, absent fathers, dying fish. They are not protected from darkness by innocence.

They simply refuse to give darkness the entire page.

That does not make hope harmless. Human beings have used imagined futures to create both heavens and mass graves. The ability to picture a world that does not exist is the source of art, revolution, religion, propaganda, and war. Imagination is not automatically moral. It is only powerful.

But perhaps hope does not need to mean believing everything will be okay.

Perhaps hope is the decision to make something while knowing it may not save anyone.

A poem beside the wound. A flower beside the fire. A yellow sun above a house with no door.

The first half of this series has moved through survival, surrender, embodiment, God, and hope without allowing any of them to remain innocent. Each answer becomes the next problem. Survival can become imprisonment. Surrender can become freedom. The body can be both protector and threat. God can be both explanation and excuse. Hope can be both defiance and denial.

I do not think poetry should resolve these contradictions. I think it should make them impossible to ignore.

Maybe existence cannot be divided cleanly into beautiful and terrible. Maybe beauty is terrible because it keeps appearing where it has no business being. Maybe the sunflower does not redeem the concrete but indicts it. Maybe the child’s yellow sun is not proof that the world is good.

Maybe it is proof that the world has not finished convincing us to become cruel.

And maybe that is enough for now.

Not salvation.

Not an answer.

Just a little more page the darkness did not get.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

THE CHILDREN DREW THE SUN ANYWAY

I told the children to draw the world.

One made a blue house with six windows and no door. One drew her mother taller than the trees. One colored the whole page black, then asked for another black crayon because the first one was tired.

Every sun was yellow.

Always in the corner. Always smiling like it hadn’t seen the news.

I wanted to tell them the sun is not kind. It does not rise for us. It is a controlled explosion we have mistaken for encouragement. One day it will swallow the planet and every picture we ever hung on a refrigerator will burn without an audience.

Instead I said, That’s beautiful.

Adults lie to children because the truth has terrible bedside manners.

We say the future belongs to them as if we have not been spending it in advance. We hand them a smoking planet and a box of washable markers. We teach them to recycle the cup while corporations recycle the blame. Then we tape their little green Earths to the classroom wall and call it hope.

Hope photographs well.

That is part of the problem.

From far away, hope and denial wear the same bright shirt. Both smile in disaster footage. Both say everything will be okay when everything has already become something else.

But the children were not saying that.

They knew more than I gave them credit for. They drew storms. Graves. A fish with plastic in its stomach. A father standing outside a house he was not allowed to enter. They drew blood red, sky blue, grass green. They did not soften the world.

They just refused to give darkness the whole page.

Maybe hope is not believing we will be saved.

Maybe hope is noticing what is unsaved and making something beside it.

A flower next to the fire.

A joke in the hospital.

A yellow circle above a house with no door.

I asked one child why her sun was smiling.

She looked at me like I was the child.

She said, Because I wanted it to.

There it was: creation without permission. Meaning without evidence. A tiny god gripping a broken crayon, making light answer to her.

I almost warned her.

Power like that is dangerous.

Power like that built every heaven and every weapon. Every flag. Every future people were murdered for refusing to imagine correctly.

But she was already drawing rays beyond the edge of the paper.

One crossed onto the table.

One reached her wrist.

One pointed directly at me.

By afternoon, the real sun had moved across the classroom floor and touched every picture without choosing between them.

The beautiful ones.

The frightening ones.

The black page.

All that light, and not an ounce of mercy.

Still, before they left, the children drew the sun again.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

I FIRED GOD FOR POOR PERFORMANCE

I called God into my office on Monday.

He was late.

Of course He was late. This is a man who invented waiting rooms, unanswered prayers, and the exact three minutes between hearing the phone ring and learning who died.

I asked Him to sit.

He said He was already everywhere.

I said that kind of attitude is why we’re having this meeting.

I slid the evidence across the desk: childhood cancer, mass graves, hurricanes, fathers disappearing into concrete buildings, mothers teaching their daughters to mistake fear for respect. I included mosquitoes because cruelty does not become cute just because it is small.

God glanced at the paperwork and said something about free will.

I said a tornado does not have free will.

He said something about a larger plan.

I asked how large a plan has to become before the people inside it stop counting.

He looked tired then. Older than light. Less like a king and more like an exhausted surgeon standing over a body that would not stop becoming another body.

For one dangerous second, I felt sorry for Him.

Then I remembered the children.

I told God His position had been terminated effective immediately. No severance. No worship. Security would escort Him beyond the limits of the observable universe.

He asked who would replace Him.

I said nobody.

The room became very quiet.

Not peaceful. Peace is quiet with consent. This was the quiet after a gun jams. The quiet of realizing the monster under the bed was load-bearing.

Without God, there was no one to blame for the blood except the hand. No divine script. No mysterious reason. No heaven laundering horror into purpose. Just us—soft animals with excellent vocabularies, building machines to make suffering happen faster.

I had wanted freedom.

What I got was jurisdiction.

Suddenly every hungry person was on my desk. Every war had my number. Every stranger I ignored became a prayer addressed directly to me.

I called after God.

He had not moved.

Maybe because He is merciful.

Maybe because I had forgotten He was everywhere.

I offered Him His job back with reduced authority. No floods. No tests. No asking terrified people to call terror faith.

He smiled like a wound learning to speak.

He said, You still think this is my office.

Then He placed the keys in my hand.

They were warm.

They were wet.

Outside, the world continued making victims and weather.

I wanted to pray.

There was nobody left to pretend I hadn’t heard.

[earthsickworld]

POETRY

MY BODY HAS NEVER HEARD OF ME

My body has never heard of me.

I know this because I have asked it to calm down and it has called the police. I have asked it to sleep and it has pulled the fire alarm. I have stood in the bathroom at three in the morning saying we are safe, we are safe, we are safe while my heart tried to leave through the emergency exit of my mouth.

The body does not speak English.

It speaks chemical. Pressure. Flinch. Flood.

It speaks in knees that remember floors the mind has professionally forgotten.

People tell me to listen to my body as if my body has not been leaving threatening voicemails since childhood. As if every ache is ancient wisdom and not sometimes a bad chair, low iron, or the ghost of a hand that is no longer there.

My body is not a temple.

Temples are built on purpose.

My body is an animal shelter during a thunderstorm. Every cage shaking. Every creature innocent. Every creature capable of biting the person who came to help.

Still, it keeps me alive with no respect for my opinion. It closes wounds while I am busy reopening them. It turns food into movement, air into argument, sleep into another morning I did not authorize. Cells divide in the dark like tiny religious extremists, absolutely certain there should be more of me.

More of me.

Imagine that kind of faith.

I have spent years trying to become a person while my body has remained committed to being meat. It bleeds on schedule. Sweats at the wrong moment. Wants what I do not trust. Rejects what I love. It carries my consciousness around like an aggressive little hat.

And one day it will kill me.

That is the contract nobody remembers signing. The body protects you until protection becomes impossible, then begins the slow administrative work of becoming earth.

Maybe betrayal is too strong a word.

Maybe I am the betrayal.

Maybe consciousness is what happened when the animal looked in a mirror and became embarrassed. Maybe the soul is just flesh developing stage fright. Maybe every thought I have ever called mine is the body speaking in a language too ashamed to admit it has an accent.

So I place my hand over my heart.

It does not recognize the gesture.

It keeps beating.

Not for me.

Under me.

Against me.

As if somewhere beneath my name, my history, my carefully assembled personality, something older is running through the forest with my face in its teeth.