When a hurricane passes close by my city but all I see is some quick clouds I have to keep driving. There’s something about the concept of a dangerous storm that makes me feel like I’m in a parallel world looking into the real one through some sort of VR glasses. As an observer, everything is prettier. The banal is captivating and the blurry quotidian is my new muse, undressed and noble while walking around the studio aware of her sting. Standing in natural light at magic hour, looking through the window to the world of maybe/maybe not collapse but definitely undefined, I look at the vertical valley in the small of her back. It’s backlit so I squint. Gunshots pop outside where an opioid-ridden high school was opened in 2008. My muse doesn’t move because that would ruin everything happening in my ecstasy and charcoal hands. Everything I touch keeps the oil/black dust combo like marked territory trash that piled up in the corner named “iron deficiency”. That was back then, before my hunter-gatherer instincts spilled into the empty casket with mirror bottom. I’ll never forget that image. What a mess to leave behind.
ryan meyer art rapid prose poem 1