Flowers for the aesthete

I.
Remembrances are the warmth that soaks the viscera,
while idle speculation ventilates the lungs
and beauty is the scarlet that rolls in the blood.

II.
Addicted to the whimsies and antics of Life, and dying by the day.
Death overtakes all that ventures to live, snatching the softness of flesh and the sweetness of voice, leaving only bones, calcified regrets– vestiges of grace.
But it is because his most favourite flowers will shrivel by tomorrow that they smell so sweet to him today.

III.
The aftertaste of melancholy will always linger over the aesthete, for his paintings are more human than he– who lived the lives of a thousand colorful portraits, but left his own frame unfilled.

Portrait of wry remarks

Cynic is he who
laughs heartily, not with Life
but at her, instead.

Libertines, Tyrants, and Man.

If only Man could live like those other
freethinkers who exist o’er existence.
Libertines past humanity’s wonder;
those who love for its sake, without pretence.
But Man berates himself for such amours.

If only Man could live fearless of those
who dare oppress and punish other men.
Yet ’tis naught but o’ fancy an o’erdose;
Oppressors are no more than other men
and Man himself is the only Tyrant.

Alas, there’s yet more for Man’s sweet dolour.
If it be regarded in true candour
what he loves and fears most is ev’ryone.
Libertines, Tyrants, and Man, all are one.

A lesson in astronomy

The scholar is a remarkable man. He somehow manages to take the tangled mass of little dots that the heavens are, connect them to each other–the specks so far apart from one another, and so confused and incoherent–and make them into constellations. It is no feat for the faint of heart, this of the scholar.

But someone has to do it, because man sometimes finds delight in looking up at the open night skies with star charts in hand; in looking up and pointing at the stars, in tracing with eager fingers, back and forth through the mess of little dots, the lines so meticulously crafted by the scholar.

If (and only if) he is adept at his scholarly vocations, his constellations will be pretty enough for man to contentedly trace over.

Lukewarm

Man sat under the radiant sun one of those eternal evenings. He could not help but to feel and admire what was around him. As Zephyr swept the broad plains that lie before his sight, Man felt a burning desire; the craving to be, even though just for an instant—ephemeral as himself—, the mighty wind. The thought of wind flew across his mind evoking thoughts of times long-gone, and even those of times to come. Man imagined the past and the future merging as one in Present. Zephyr had seen the days of yore, and would live to see the death of Father Time.

Man was overwhelmed to think of things so far beyond his reach. Desperate he did cry out in distress; a cry so deep it could have made consciousness itself give a shriek. The wind proved impassible at his screams. To this, Man broke into laughter where he stood—the wind roaring around him, menacing— and thought a rather comforting thought; that, as immutable as the wind was, it was unable to feel. It could run across endless fields and shake forests rooted in ancient grounds, yet it could not take pleasure in it nor appreciate the solemnity of the dignified trees. The wind was on the skin like soft petals, yet it could not feel the tenderness caressing back.

Zephyr, with all its might, could not entertain thought; without thought, unaware of himself, Man could not possibly exist—and what business has man, then, to be the wind if the wind does not think, does not feel? Man’s craving died, gradually decomposing into lukewarm afterthoughts.