THE ARTIST DESPAIRS IN HIS FAILINGS He attempts to paint a still-life, but finds life keeps moving, fruit rotting, flowers fading, limbs blurring. He discovers himself better able to stay still, imagining the paint on the canvas, the brush stroking the image into being, the finished picture better than anything he could have ever painted, and yet, false for all that, false. THESE FLOWERS OF STONE, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE A flower of stone grew from the seed I found in a dream of a land I didn't recognise and yet still somehow knew. It had no colour, this flower of stone, but grey, no green nor red, orange or white, simply grey, faded and dirty, like a cheaply designed and poorly realised building left to time and decay. It was still beautiful, though, in the way such seemingly abandoned things can be. It could still steal your attention for minutes as you studied it, tentatively touched its form to see if it was real and not some illusion carried over from a wish made but forgotten even as it was spoken. It lasted one winter, this flower of stone, before the cracks began to appear, tiny tears in its stem that passed up to its petals, then the summer wind came and blew it to dust, each particle scattered wide, growing into new stone flowers, until half the world was covered, the cycle continuing on, spreading them farther and farther, until, for a season or two, nowhere on this earth was without one. The evolution of survival strengthened them through each generation, these multiple flowers of stone, until they were able to last all seasons long, the sweeping eye unable to find a place where one did not grow. REAP/SOW Our world crumbles around us, or more to the point, reaches the end of the collapse, begun lifetimes ago, and when we are called to explain, we simply say we didn't know, we had our eyes closed this whole time, our fingers in our ears, like children refusing to see or be seen, refusing to hear, children suddenly made adults refusing to collect what we owe.
Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. His poetry collections are Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge, The Madness Of Qwerty, A Foetal Heart and Bones Speaking With Hard Tongues.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com