A WORLD IN SIX MOVEMENTS
The First Nature
Beauty used to be found.
Now it is made, faster than we can feel it.
This is what it looks like when it arrives:
perfect, total, and a little too much.
It does not announce itself as new.
It simply takes the place where the real used to be.
Nothing Was Born
This was never a portrait.
It is a first nature that did not grow, it was rendered.
Every gesture placed. Every flaw removed.
Nothing here was born, and nothing here will age.
The New Relics
The world keeps these images the way it once kept saints.
Lit. Framed. Returned to, daily.
A devotion with no one left at the center of it,
worship that has outlived its god.
Too Perfect to Touch
There is a price for beauty this complete.
It arrives faster than feeling can follow.
Close enough to admire. Too finished to touch.
The sublime, and the small dread underneath it.
Who Stays
Most look for a moment and move on.
The image was never asking to be seen.
It was building a world,
and waiting to see who would stay.
Everything is shown now.
— or —