Discipline and Vanity- book jacket art and a poem

Discipline and Vanity

Upright animal
your music feels bluesy
your window looks shattered
the voice emanating
from your silhouette
sings the word, "insane."
How could you tell anyone
that inside you feel lonely
inside you feel lonely
when no animal
has ever uttered the word, "alone."
Yes, you stand upright,
supported by uneven heels
sickled foot arches
coiled up with memories
of how you street walked
the wild.

You'll tell us stories
of how you branded history with heartache
leaving men more alive than when they were dead.
But death you'll insist is merely the birth of eternal dreaming.

We interrogators will tell you to shut up and look pretty
shut up and look pretty
while we undress you for bed.
Afterwards, you'll want to try to talk without lipstick
about love and its laws
and what can you do to learn them
as you live best you can.

Our answer will be to release you into its poverty.

One day you will try to find us
find us and kill us
for setting you free
because you will find that freedom is boredom
compassion is selfish
only slavery will save you
when your blue animal runs wild.

We will always be your imperfect bishops,
who build brothels beside and inside of cathedrals
but never above us or outside of reach.
Our dreams of you, finite, our love, conditional
Though our memories of your music, immortal.


poem and image by Tiffany Osedra Miller