Prompt Eighteen: "Turn a Blind Eye"
Put yourself to work making beautiful things, and that is all the world cares to concern itself with.
If you paint, no one cares when your spittle lands on their faces.
If you sing, then no one is really listening to how you talk to them.
If you write, no one thinks that it’s wrong to have to mind your every base needs.
If you carve, and you polish, the maid walks around with teeth pushed a half-ilm too high into those flushed gums and no one says anything.
Sew, and sew gorgeously, and sew in gold and lace, then no one complains and everyone bites their lip when you prick them like dolls for display.
Love, and love fully, and love with the right words and the tender moments, and no one can bear to weigh your personhood against that love. No gravity and its hungry fangs; no spectre with a mother’s eyes; no red-twined pool of life; no love to the end of all loves. No one.
To be an artist means that no one minds the dirty little pacts they sign with you. Anything to be closer to you, the privilege of seeing that dazzle light up from the source. A morbid affair where they walk out a little more used, a little more hesitant on the step, and a little more loose on the bargains they’ll make with you, over and over again.
And they walk out that door, and they fasten their clothes, and they wipe away the pretty smears and they’ll lie to people later about those wounds. And when others ask of the time spent with you, they’ll tell them that the experience was transcendent, and profound. To be touched by you was a trigger of metamorphosis. An intimacy inaccessible by any other soul; you, a creature of niche and hook.
Of course others would never understand the sheer humanness of it all; that celebration of everything so much more meaningful than life at its manifest, somehow able to be narrowed down to your inked skin and the picture-perfect part to how you hold your lip. An intoxication that bears down like ill-fit skin in that moment, but they’ll always speak of fondly.
You cannot tell me that any mechanism throbs stronger.
You cannot tell me that their blood sings free.
You are a lantern, and the bugs buzz.
The bugs are looking at you.
You cannot.
You.
Every pleasure has been born of this.
Love is an art, and you, an artist.
That brush begs for you.
They beg for you.
“Encore.”
You.
And that’s where you give them it.
Here, is where the world begins.
Where the dazzle comes from.
Where it all lights up.
You always do.
Showtime.
You.
