the unsuccessful artists

Success is a mirage. It is what I see in a desert of creativity, grains of desperation pooled around raw, burnt skin, always hovering over the horizon, faded by dusk. I dream of it everyday, pleading the arching branches dripping with its fruit of stars to bend and permit me one bite—juice dribbling greedily down the corners of my mouth, evaporating on my tongue. My fingertips reach toward an infinity and grasp nothing but air, though maybe it is my ignorance that betrays the idea that nothing could be the very essence of limitlessness. I must make it material because I am made of flesh and bone, my voice echoes, and my eyes show. I cannot be if I am not seen, I have no thoughts if not written in my notes.

I live in the shadow of could-be’s; I exist in between the seams. I am observer, not observed. Is there something of artistry reserved for people of different tropes? Those who access the sublime with the swipe of credit cards; stars picked from bought charts. An artist itself may be a mirage, an organized ideal of humanity dressed in a performativity that has been designed by endless pairs of eyes and consumed by stomachs whose hunger knows all heights. Artists who are told what art they are, what art they can be. Artists marked by jealousy and artists pined for hopelessly.

It is all a facade.

It is a privilege to let the artist unravel, fall apart messily. To be gouged and devoured and regurgitated because success is success and success must be met. So lose it all, buy into what an artist is and what an artist must be. Find a muse and demolish it, be discomforted by the unusual. Weird is not fanatical. Weird is not a mirage, it is not palatable, it is not served on the platter until it has been worn by breasts and filler.

Artists must look the same: almond eyes, bubblegum lips, candied skin. Artists must not stray too far from death. This desert is unkind and unwilling to be generous. Although, an artist who dies prematurely is an artist who is beautiful. A statue of imagined glory, a gravestone of lust, an erotic fantasy of how they might have been transformed by time; youth eternalized in photographs and youth never soiled by wrinkled defiance.

Animated corpses kissed and devoured by the sun; an abraded, exposed body crawling through a purgatory of reverie. I want to find the oasis; I must find the oasis. The oasis chooses who may wander into its sacred heart. The oasis confuses the soul, you may enter it still struck by mirage, it may take years to discover what you thought was God is an empty crater of spirits who have lost their song. The water dries up, the palm trees wither, the sun sets and the desert shivers. The illusion fades and you sob, void of tears, wind sweeping sand over the plans you never pioneered.