Poets are people too

I found myself reading about the movie Bright Star. I really have no desire to watch it, it's about John Keats, and his greatest love. I don't want his greatest love to be a person. I don't want him to have been a person. He's a name in books I read, occational founder of quotes I use. But a person, no.

William Shakespeare isn't a person. Karin Boye isn't a person. Edith Södergran isn't a person. Nelly Sachs isn't a person. Thomas Tranströmer isn't a person. Bruno K. Öijer might be a person. Kristina Lugn isn't a person, for sure. They're words, words, words, endless words for me to rip apart and make mine.

The endless constructions of life, lust, love, fear, hate, discoveries, melt downs, travels, transformations, they're nothing but means for me to see the world differently. It's not about the poets. There are plenty of excellent poets that never get read, those with perfect ryhmes and verses that never get read because they don't speak.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Knowing the poets only gives a false sense of understanding. We can't feel what they felt. Did Shelley have intentions or was he just high? What's my intention when I write? None. I have no intentions. I just do it. And I would hate for people hundreds of years from now to remember those words of mine

"and those shoes I wear

laces cut like

the hair on the barbers floor

died before it leaves the skin"

and have them mean anything bigger than what I thought of on a dreary day when nothing else would work. Yet that is exactly what I'm doing to the lot of them, I'm depriving them of their humanity for my own selfish reasons. My own wish to make sense of the world via words of others, because the non existant God knows I can't manage it by myself.

Telling myself I'm not a poet is a way to preseve my individuality, yet, I'm just like everyone else. Telling myself I'm none of those labels that define me is my rebellion, but all I can rebel against is myself. Utterly useless.

THE MOON
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I.

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

II.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

We should write what we know. I know nothing but the wor(l)ds of others, I'm not naive enough to think mine matters so in order to make the wor(l)ds mine I must kill all the poets.