The Dorian Portrait
If you’re not saying anything, then why should I listen? Same shit, different day. Coercion and complicity. Give me some grit. Throw some dirt in my eyes. Call me out. Anything but this pantomime of rigor mortis grins, these obsequious slugs towing the line under the flag of creativity. Better frustration, better rage, better desperate confusion than this servile spectacle, this dreadfully delightful jolly.
Times past, your medium actually meant something. There was pain here, and danger, and uncertainty, and courage, and lunacy, and exquisite togetherness. Nobody was safe. Nobody (and everybody) was sound. Hacking at the edges, screaming and shouting, bloodied and battered and brimming with irrepressible protest. And yet here we are, swingin’ merrily along on a plastic circus teacup (sleigh) ride (minimum height 3 foot 7), gyrating titillatingly through AstroTurf fields stapled over a heaving bedrock of imminent collapse, an Akiran mass of cancerous discontent muffled only by wilfully ignorant ears turned towards inoculating silence conjured by state-prescribed music meds.
Your artistry is not an automatic solution, nor is it de facto resistance. It is not an excuse. All we are is sound, and so if you choose to move me, to ooze across this mortifying vacancy, do so not like a pebble, but a falling mountain. A unifying violence sinking apathy and (dis)consent, a synaptic realignment displacing any and every thought of surrender. If you pacify, if you placate, if you pander, you have betrayed the immensurable power of your being, and for that you alone bear a grave responsibility. This shaman is shamed and fallen, a soldier of the ossifying machine of inhuman hunger.
Animate yourself. Remember who you (we) are. Be prepared to fuck up. Don’t back down. Others may turn away, may even curse your name, but you will stand tall in the warmth of your glorious compassion. You carry in you the truth that connects, the love that binds, the immediacy of the clear light. When all else clings to casual slumber, be the racket that rends the Dorian portrait asunder.