Slow Burn
So you saw the best minds of your generation destroyed by madness. I used to read your words as tragic and passionate and the hefty price of greatness. Now, I think you were only lucky enough to believe that you saw the best minds of any generation when you most likely witnessed nothing of the sort.
Iโve met great minds and mediocre minds and poor minds. I know less and less with each passing year, but one thing I know for certain is that when madness comes along, it destroys without preference and without discrimination. Be it for the ancient heavenly connection or this earthly one of touch and thought, my friend, we all burn the same.
If only I could still believe in tortured legends. I want to look out of an adolescentโs lenses and see imploding gods instead of hatchlings that could not reach the ocean. I wish I could consider only the angelheaded hipsters dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, and not the souls shackled to those streets, without the means to score that angry fix, without any kicks at all, looking instead toward a way to survive until the next dawn and the next dawn and the next. When the final flames flicker out, they are there, barely standing, in the ashes, with charred tears and brittle bones but a beating heart and that is what I now see as the price of greatness.
