To My Artistic Self

by Anna Yin

Forget it, too difficult to make this living –
no matter how easy it seems
to paint buckets of money,
and how smoothly verses flow through this pen…
No use. Even with tickets half-price,
the gallery remains empty, never a moment
drawing currency from casinos or so-called economy.

Mind you, this pen will jam –
more bills to pay, fewer cantos to sing.
Visions from the museum
where passionate Molly took you
prove to be meteor showers,
soon you face the dark by the sea.

Perhaps you too love gold,
longing for wealth and freedom –
under dark circled eyes,
you take poetic badges
off your empty pockets;
and dig into job questing,
filling in keywords:
Java, Python and Ruby,
pitching automation, transaction
and income expectation.

Is it possible to answer
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
To craft this
you must lie or partly die;
yet still you hang on
to the golden pen.

— from Juniper Volume 4, Issue 2