Creativity is a thing I’ve found I can’t force. If I do it comes out fake, especially when I’m trying to do it for an audience. I found this particularly during a stint of creating my short form Friday series on YouTube. It started with the best of intentions, but I wound up writing it for YouTube, which wasn’t faithful to what I intended, so I stopped.
After a taking a while to regroup, life got busy again and I found my writing took a bit of a nosedive, I picked up my camera and started looking for inspiration there. In my impatience, it felt like a slow drip, but whilst photographing the disparity in the wealthy areas of Paris, I felt a stirring to write about the baked-in injustice of our current world culture. It welled up like a scream, pages and pages of words have followed and I’m on the verge of publishing it as a zine – the working title is “Subtle Art”.
This collection is part righteous angry rant, part reflection and a chunk of holding up the mirror. It’s also a bit more ‘sweary’ than my previous work, but I’m a believer using it deliberately and sparingly to drive home a point. I’ll be looking at options for producing physical copies, but in the meantime, here’s a snippet: My poem, tentatively titled “Rebel?”, an exploration of societal expectation against the lens of biblical expectation of how we react to injustice.
Rebel?
exuding the subtle art of not giving a fuck
viscerally caring too much
I want to rebel
to turn over tables
to call out hypocrisy
But what of my own?
A plank for a speck
not an eye-for-an-eye
not a tooth-for-a-tooth
what could be more punk than loving the one holding the hilt
as the steel twists between my ribs,
as the cavity of my chest fills with my own fluid,
the capacity to breathe squeezed out of me,
whilst I pray for their salvation
for their situation
let that be my action in this moment
the only thing over which I have any control
and hope that I see them again when I’m raised
new body, same soul.
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