Are Poets Human?

The first in an eleventy fishteenth-part series on the quintessence of poetical guts. Or, as my dear friend, the late Lord Russell might say, ARE God?

Frost comes out of the groovework

Forcefeeding the arts

Outside/inside

I love how meandering my way abroad these interwebs can bring about a confluence of otherwise discrete subjects and notions. I believe that in libraries, they call this serendipity, and it can be rather closely mimicked by shutting one's eyes and tipping random volumes from the shelf. Of course, neither of these procedures is particularly serendipitous after all. Algorithms and Dewey decimals aside, most of my wanderings lead me to the same question. Namely, how is it that one lives as a real person and as an artist simultaneously?

I've developed various personae to assist with what would otherwise be rather tumultuous shifting. I consider them packing peanuts with very fine hairdos.

But try telling a for-real person that you've developed personae and they're bound raise an eyebrow. Yet, verily, I say unto thee, no artist I've spoken to sees this as bizarre, ridiculous, or the least bit anti-social. Because it's not - for anyone. Most people, unfortunately, feel a mite uncomfortable admitting to themselves that they are different people in their various capacities (at home, work, trolling on the interwebs, &c.). I'm often pompous enough to consider these poor souls mindlessly segmented. Though, this is not accurate, either; I should think we all bear this in mind.

It's the difference in comfort level at heart - artists don't feel like phoney baloneys shifting personae. This is not dishonesty, they acknowledge - it's the only real honesty! Every poem is likewise a person. Resultant cacophony. We're charged to make it counterpoint (though, if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it, as they say). I'm drawn to conceptual art, to what must seem to people who have their pulse on anything current in particular as the tired-old project.

My project, at present, is to fix a deadline and KEEP it. You see, I do after all have no grounding in reality whatever, and you have all been mightily fooled.

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