They tell me not to blink.

They tell me not to cover my eyes in shame or fear

or hate.

But I hide them because I cannot keep a smile on my

“oh so beautiful face”

and because lenses feign a human eye

in a way that makes me develop

disgust and anger over how humans concoct cameras to flash

forever stamps onto life’s natural, ephemeral art.

 

My wish to remain mortal prevents my perpetuation. Photography is not art - it is

the largest plagiarizer in the history of human innovations.

It captures moments, releasing nurture and nature from need of the people.

The people, who now preserve the world in zeros and

ones that destroy active participation in a time of tactile and temporal art

of sublime and divine impurity.

 

In the face of a camera, if it can be so called,

I shudder, effacing it from vision because it is fake in every respect.

Art is not the collaging of moments ripped from their free floating grace,

trapping and keeping time to serve as personal timekeepers as we obsess

over possessing that which we have not the right to own.

Time is not our servant to be locked behind lenses and enslaved on sheets

that sit collected in cabinets or stripped naked and glared at behind glass.

 

Free time produces stark beauty while the mockery found in lenses produces fingers

that point and juries that jeer at our lives, while we sit idly by behind a camera

and ask others to force smiles and say “Cheese!”

trying to rip the souls behind

the lenses of their eyes

into the lenses of ours

forever.

But I blink.