Quincy M., “bluee”
Hail the mountain that beholds the sea,
where ashes breathe in the clouds and rain.
The sun beats on my back, it burns through my clothes,
it burns.
Icarus, my blazing sun,
who was burdened by great visions of beauty.
What did you see in burning?
What glorious flower blooms only in flames,
bursting with creative liberty at every seam,
that pulled you to grasp at an impossible elysium?
How, even from the first strokes of paint
that muddied your old bedroom walls,
did you look at the fire with a sick yearning?
There were embers in each shade,
each artpiece and spoken poem feeding to your paradise–
your ruin.
Every creative step built on a ladder,
you climbed with a fervid desperation,
to reach your climax.
You were a hungry beast, sedated only
in artistic expression.
I warned you, then, that fire burned, and you told me–
“I would rather die burning than live cold.
This fire, it’s a friend of mine, and it will go far–
and my art will go farther, it will reach
every crevice of the world.”
Now the Ocean stares at me, and your ashes–
your final masterpiece, your climatic resolution–
is spread evenly in the Aegean.
My fingers graze the fire
I struck in hopes that this grief,
this horrid grief, will leave
once I have felt the last parts of you–
the epicenter of the supernova you became.
It burns me, reminds me of the portraits
that stain every wall you blessed,
the parchment you left behind in the labyrinth,
a trail of poems that must now mark the exit–
your escapist heaven.
I am reminded of my son,
how you lived for the love of life,
and died because love did not love you.
You must have felt,
in the creative exhilaration of death,
that at once you could experience
the euphoric release of art,
that at once
your life amounted–
blissfully amounted–
and resolved,
and ended.
It is over.
The fountains of creation
that once bloomed are barren.
The end, cathartic in the way only
a wound can be, exists only in the way
you wished for it to.
If only for a moment,
if only for the beautiful moment, where
your peak is reached, euphoric with no end
until finality.
You will never have to live
in search for a memory.
If only then, if only now,
you are happy–
My artistic son