I live for the night because it is the night which justifies me. By day, each laboured smile of acquiescience, each exchange of empty phrases, each and every last second of monotony drenched in the rabid dramas of others, tears at any semblance of imagination I may have. I am not allowed to feel this way. The modernists did away with any hope for the suffering, thinking people of the world by writing them into novels. The Hunger-Artist is a cliche, probably played by some Gerard Butler-type in the film version. Yet what people appear - still - not to understand is that those of us not blessed with an affinity with the world strong enough for poetry do not suffer for art. We suffer for consciousness. We suffer for the very fact that our suffering is not art but, instead, a state of being. By day, we stubbornly cling to the fantastical fragments of the imagination we have carved for ourselves from out of the dead wood of the world. Yet, even this state of being is little more than our inheritance from the critics of the arts. By day, their observations on the introverted, self-obsessed, self-(de)constructing art of yesteryear peck at the very soul of those of us for whom the sadness of the highest poetry is an artless way of life.

And yet, night-time! So free of the world, wrapping herself around me like a desperate lover hanging (herself) on my every word or whim. So often, I write myself into tears, fetishising that peculiar brand of suffering unrecognised by those intelligent enough not to think: tedium. So often, I hurt myself with words I shall never speak, shimmering as they do in the light of overt consciousness and meekly rolling against each other in some vain hope of becoming something more than their creator. By night, it matters little that I transpose the weightiest of feelings into kitsch, nor that I stare into the abyss and react by drawing a two-dimensional well of despair with hand-me-down words. I think to myself and only for myself. I snuggle the absence of pressure. I continue this way for hours, waiting for sleep to come, knowing that should it not come, I shall be alive for longer.