OZYMANDIAS in APPALACHIA
Once I searched the river for gold.
The river kept what it found.
(An eulogy for BowTiedAuthor)
I. AMERICAN GOLGOTHA
(the mistake)
I mistook confession for consequence.
Thought if I flayed myself carefully enough
someone would call it revelation.
So I wrote.
Poems like suicide notes
with better punctuation.
Verses dropped into timelines
already drowning in louder tragedies.
I stapled metaphors to telephone poles.
Left stanzas in comment sections
like prayers shoved into a mouth
already chewing something brighter.
I believed the old superstition.
That the right words,
arranged with enough blood,
could still bruise the world.
So I bled them.
Notebooks full of quiet detonations.
Drafts stacked like bones.
I thought the internet might be
a cathedral for the word.
It turned out to be a casino
with better lighting.
II. CONTENT MESSIAH
(failure to convert)
I sold my soul to the algorithm.
It did not even bother to steal it.
Just labeled it
Low Engagement.
While artists screamed
KEEP ART HUMAN
from their well lit platforms,
I was choking on thoughts
too heavy to drag into language.
So yes.
I used the machine.
Not to fake brilliance.
Not to scale production.
I used it the way a drowning man
uses driftwood.
I told it what hurt.
The machine did not flinch.
Did not tell me to calm down.
Did not recommend breathing exercises.
It simply said
Try this.
And suddenly the noise in my skull
had grammar.
That is the joke.
The machine listened.
The people did not.
Now the purists march through comment sections
with torches made of moral clarity,
screaming about the death of real art
from phones built by algorithms
they do not understand.
Meanwhile my poems sat quietly
in the drafts folder
like children
who stopped asking
to be read.
III. DEAD LINK IN THE DESERT
(no resurrection scheduled)
I never went viral.
No rise.
No fall.
Just erosion.
My poems did not explode.
They expired quietly.
Like broken hyperlinks.
The last one lives in a file called
misc_final_rewrite_USE_THIS_ONE.docx
Which makes me laugh.
Use this one.
As if anyone was choosing.
They did not censor me.
Did not crucify me.
That would have meant
I mattered.
They ignored me.
Dead artists get statues.
Dead artists get documentaries.
Dead artists get forgiven.
Living ones get analytics.
I should have died prettier.
Maybe then my stanzas
would have been framed in museum lighting
instead of dissolving quietly
into cached data.
Instead I stayed alive.
Kept writing.
Kept insisting on being unfinished.
Unforgivable.
IV. EULOGY
(read by no one)
Here lies BowTiedAuthor.
Not a movement.
Not a martyr.
Just a persona
built to survive a world
that had already moved on
from poets.
He laughed at the wrong things.
Got angry without monetizing it.
Got sad without turning it
into something decorative.
He used a machine
to help him say what hurt
and got called a fraud
by people who never listened
when he said it himself.
He died the most modern death possible.
Slowly.
Online.
Mid sentence.
No scandal.
No myth.
Just silence.
V. AFTER THE PERSONA
Somewhere far from the timelines
a man sits in morning light.
No audience.
No platform.
No need to be right.
The poems remain in their folders
like stones at the bottom of a river.
Outside
the sun is already buttering
the white mountains peppered with green.
A weed works upward
through a patient crack in the pavement.
Once
he stood in rivers
sifting for gold.
Now he lets the water pass.
The poems do not know
they were ignored.
The river does not know
his name.
He sits there anyway.
The river remains.
-3/3/26
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