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Paper People


Every drawing is an illusion

Appearing to contain depth

To be genuine

But come too close and you’ll fathom

It’s nothing more than a flat illustration

Sitting on an 8 by 11

Limited to a world in the second dimension


.1 millimeters is apparently not deep enough

To reach for a long-lost memory

To stretch for a time yet to be

Bound to an eternal present


Paper-thin people

Stuck inside a four-cornered border

Machine-cut

No room for error

For messy mistakes

Flat images, shallow minds, lacking depth

What you see is all that you can ever hope to get

No hidden sides

No turned faces

No secrets stashed away in dark places

No questions desired to be answered

No deeper meanings hidden within ambiguous words

No thoughts beyond the surface

No wondering whether life has a purpose

Immersed in a world of superficiality

Speaking cheap words

Spewing artificiality

Charcoal caricatures, focused on the trivial

Perception blowing images way out of proportion

But –

This is not me

Instead, I’m the words behind the drawings

The thoughts, the feelings, the inspiration

Words formed on paper-thin sheets

That stack to create a leather-bound book, pages deep

Words that have been edited and re-edited

And are still being edited every day

Because I refuse to limit myself to a single page

When I could be pages

I refuse to imprison myself

When I could be busting out of these cages

Life is about growth and climbing to different stages

So why do they insist on remaining in these hypnotic dazes

I cannot be put on paper

It makes sense on paper, they say

Making sense on paper may make sense for paper people

But I am not a paper person

Paper people making my life decisions from a paper

The black on white is only black and white

But I am all the different shades of grey

I am too broad to squeeze into a narrow stereotype

Too deep to be poured into shallow, pre-made containers

I’ll overflow

My contents oozing out

Destroying all the art I worked so hard to originate

Erasing the layers of color, I carefully attempted to relate

Leaving a washed out copy of what was once a valuable original

So, while paper people attempt to cover up their ink-spills

With tacky white-out

I’ll be using every splatter

Every stray line

Every too-much

Every not-enough

Every erroneous wrinkle

And every accidental crease

To create

What will ultimately be

My three-dimensional masterpiece

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