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i am an imitation.

[‘So poetic imitation is no longer considered mimicry, but is regarded as an act of imaginative creation by which the poet, drawing his material from the phenomenal world, makes something new out of it.’]

i see beautiful people in the street, with messy mangled wild hair and old, baggy clothes that fall on their frame like thin silk drapes thrown on grandma’s loveseat, and i say: ‘damn. i oughta try that’ & get a cold perm & realize how much better my money is spent at goodwill.

[‘The poet imitates not the surface of things but the reality embedded within.’]

then there’s a voice that would make one lovely spoken poet, sometimes even if their words were meaningless, or jumbled and trashed but with meaning. imagine hearing a prayer from those lips, as a god. maybe that’d be dangerous, maybe you’d want’a hear them beg, just to take in their sound. so i pray that my voice may sound so sweet, hardly thinking of the punishment i’d receive. i beg too, yes, but not so beautifully.

then there are the dead ones. they’ve got no physical life, and yet their photos, words, worlds, and even audio taped whims still exist on this sack. so through that they seem perfectly, wholly alive & breathing better than i. they scare me the most, though, cause even as a non spiritual i feel them when i read their works or hear their voice, and i dread to think that maybe they could see me acting like a fool in my small, messy room and i feel embarrassed. i want a life like those dead ones. maybe not in the sense that i’m six feet under or on someone’s proper mantle, or in some storage unit in the midwest, but to have a life so memorable, so immortal as theirs. and not in the fame sense, either: just a life that i can finally remember. not like this one, where i can’t remember what happened yesterday or during my entire childhood.

[According to Aristotle’s theory, moral qualities, characteristics, the permanent temper of the mind, the temporary emotions and feelings, are all action and so objects of poetic imitation.]

Quotes from the ‘Basics of Literary Criticism,’ Dr. Vilas Salunke.