the ballad of briseis
By: Joshua Peter (he/him)
my heart is of
the flesh of figs, and that which i cannot touch: grainy sweet garnet nectar pretty to behold but easy to bruise no god shall speak for me, briseis for this fig-heart, like the heart of man craves art as it does god and though i know you not by name, but only pseudonym: blood, words, and love, we are kindred souls i'd like to believe that we are cut of the same cloth hewn of the same mound of clay (or cast into the same iron, i suppose for we became one another's anchor the day we met) i once told you, my dear briseis, that if you taught me symbiosis i would teach you love for you found pragma in philosophy cold markov's blankets freud's ego, plato's cave whereas i found pragma in alchemy's poetry chekhov's gun freud's neurotics, plato's human it means nothing. the alchemy lies beyond the chemicals, |
beyond the seed and the egg,
beyond our festivals of atonement, beyond my prima materia and your unfulfilled magnum opus it lies in simple interdependence, the oceans, the heavens, the forests, the deserts, the storms, the famines, the herds of wildebeest, the colonies of ants, the beady dew on the spider web and the purling river shallows, our acrid mouths yearning for mother's milk, the boy who makes us cry at night, the fiery logs roaring against the cold air, the hoot-owls and the faces on the wall (our skeletons never did stay in the closet) bathed in that slow, hideous wonder those interplays of love and symbiosis as i drown and die in reverie once more pray that the stakes may be forever higher that i find those eternal elysian fields so long as our achilles lives to fight again we are more alike, than you or i would ever dare to admit, briseis so humor this fig-heart: hold me and tell me that it'll be all right |
to fig-hearts and fickle fate: we aren't perfect, and that's okay.
inspired by conan gray’s “comfort crowd” and “the story”.
inspired by conan gray’s “comfort crowd” and “the story”.
My name is Joshua Peter and I am an eleventh grader at Elkins High School. I don’t have all the answers. I haven’t self-actualized to the point where I know what I want from life. I make art to cope with these anxieties. In truth, I am not extraordinary nor exceptional: simply an introspective creative seeking his place in this world.