The Beauty of Darkness (III) by Valerie Parente
I do not feel shame
when I am in pain;
I feel grace.
Pain gives you the opportunity to create
something authentically great
from a negative space
and it shows the utmost grace
when you can find honor
in an unfavorable mental state.
– Valerie Parente (11-6-2020)
The Utmost Importance by Valerie Parente
All I want
in the big scheme
is for you and me
to be able to speak
about how we feel
freely.
Where ideas are allowed
to differ in a crowd
without shutting each other down
with a buzzword to block the profound
just because one person has self doubt.
Because I might be bitter inside
from personal bad times
but that doesn’t give me the right
to say you cannot vocalize
all of your good times.
The right to speak
is the right to feel
and the right to feel
is the right to be
and if we can’t just be
then there is no point to humanity.
– Valerie Parente (11-4-2020)
The Beauty of Darkness (I) by Valerie Parente
I find
the most unwavering comfort
in my dark moods
because they remind me
that I am human
just like you.
– Valerie Parente (11-1-2020)
Copyrighted by Valerie Parente
I own exclusive legal rights to the words from this mouth
drawn by my tongue
always right and never wrong
because I feel how I’m meant to
in the phrases that come through
they’re from me to you.
If you love it, I do too
but if you hate it, I don’t know you.
– Valerie Parente (10-27-2020)
Idiosyncratic Pain by Valerie Parente
I don’t want to be known for my pain,
I want to make the most of my pain,
and if that entails
emotions to prevail
in a story that parallels
my particular mental hell
and I can make you understand
a specific circumstance
then all will be fine
’cause baby, I’m one of a kind.
– Valerie Parente (10-22-2020)
Features “The Creeper” and “Sage of Tarkus”
from The Artist, The Muse on Amazon.com
Too Much Loss For One Year by Valerie Parente
This has been a really devastating year
with more loss than our brains can comprehend,
some said with goodbyes
some with unfinished sentences.
It’s not that we’re okay with the loss,
it’s that we didn’t have a chance to lament.
It’s not that we’re dwelling in the past,
it’s that there was no proper end.
And it’s not that I’m mad or insensitive,
but there are some goodbyes I simply cannot accept.
Some explanations are not just explanations
but a farewell, my dear friend.
And I guess the collective conscience within all of us
is learning a very hard lesson,
that the world will keep on turning
no matter who’s lost interest.
– Valerie Parente (10-17-2020)
Being Abnormal by Valerie Parente
It’s just lonely…
when you’re not allowed to express pain
because you’re the mentally ill girl who can’t be taken seriously,
when you’re not allowed to drive the freeway
because no one has faith in the skills you’ve achieved,
when you’re not allowed to paint your face
because you never give in to a normal level of intimacy,
when you’re not allowed to respond to hate
because defending your mental state is a luxury,
when you’re not allowed to remember heartbreak
because normal people don’t take this long to grieve,
when you’re not allowed to cut to the chase
because only crazy people act with so much honesty.
It just gets kind of lonely inside my brain
when even your loved ones can’t understand how you operate,
because I know that my honest-to-God pain only frustrates,
adding a whole new layer to what should be normal heartbreak.
I guess what I’m trying to say
is that ordinary things like a broken heart or a common sickness
are a lot harder to cope with when you have a mental illness
because people always have a million rational reasons for why you’re incorrect
but your hyper-sensitive mind has never been dictated by such logic.
– Valerie Parente (10-9-2020)
Subconscious Effort by Valerie Parente
Nothing makes me believe in the divinity of the universe
more than the synchronicity between art and the subconscious;
because I could write and write and have no idea what I mean
but when I take a look back I can see what I needed to see
and to think that I initially didn’t understand what I was referencing in my piece
yet it found a way to acknowledge and explain my mentality
that to me is proof that the universe and all its cosmic incredibility is responsive and alive
even inside the deeply hidden facets of my mind.
– Valerie Parente (10-8-2020)
Like Fine China Analysis
I wrote this poem, “Like Fine China“, without fully understanding what my subconscious was trying to tell me. After reading it a couple of times I realized the meaning behind the words. Fine China is the symbol for making art (something beautiful) out of sadness. The sadness is a constant cycle that manifests itself like patterns on fine China, royal “blue” (sad) details that I’ve etched upon the surface (my writing). When I have days that I break down, the porcelain breaks down, and I could use the jagged pieces of sadness to hurt myself but instead I choose to use them to build a display out of the broken pieces in the form of a porcelain vase (art from my mental breakdown) and there I show off pretty flowers (rhymes through poetry). The problem that arises from creating art out of sadness, sometimes sadness that a 3rd party might see as “old news”, is that these emotions I’ve recited are as good as dead to the world, hence why the flowers in the fine China vase I’ve built are decaying. The wonder in this, though, is that those decaying flowers offer me, the writer, solace. The cycle of sadness and creativity continues as the decaying flowers become a beautiful floral tea that I turn to for comfort as a grieve the ongoing pain I’m still in. Other people don’t see the benefit of the flowers (writing about perpetual pain), but I do. The entire process from fine china to a floral tea is cathartic, as is the artistic process, and in the end I feel okay and like I can survive my own mental state. Alas, a new day comes, the sadness inevitably returns as I am overwhelmed with reminders from the real world, and the pretty pain goes back to being “too pretty to comprehend” (commentary on not fully understanding what I was writing in the poem itself “Like Fine China”). Thus the entire breaking down of fine china (delving into an artistic outlet) occurs again.
Isn’t it incredible how art can be completely mindless but reveal something so profound in the mind it spawns from?
– Valerie Parente (10-6-2020)
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