Carpe Diem Weekend Meditation #106: Turn Back Time: Flourishing Plum Blossoms in the Moonlight

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Here is the original poem for today's revision exercise.

arranging the plum-flowers,
I would enjoy them in the light of the lamp,
as if in the moonlight

© Taigi (1709-1771)

Here is my follow-up:

muse's promise leads to
lonely life of poverty
and head full of dreams

~Cie~

Notes:

I'm invoking the right to poetic expression here. My verse was inspired by this paragraph rather than directly by the featured poem.

"The original of the above haiku is even more difficult, literally: "arranging the plum, as if the moon, I would savour, lamp-light" (Wabiru translated 'enjoy', 'means' to live a life of poetry in poverty). The poet has arranged the flowers in a vase, and wishes to see them in the light of the moon, but there being no moon, he lights the lamp instead, and adds its light to the poetry and the beauty of the flowers."

I am sitting in a room which looks like a construction zone in a cold house with no working furnace, an old comforter wrapped around my legs and feet. I am wearing two pairs of socks. My hands are chafed and red from the cold. I have a space heater, which is cranked up to 90, but the little area I'm sitting in won't warm past 55, and it feels colder than that.

You know those damn Hallmark channel type movies about the romance writer living in genteel poverty, chipping devotedly away at her novel until G.Q. Cover Model Guy sweeps her away into a life of luxury and she becomes a best-selling author?

I have some bad news for you, Sunshine.

Those movies are bullshit.

Committed writers are more likely to be like me and my literary heroes H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.

We're committed to writing because otherwise, we'd be committed to the mental hospital, and ain't nobody wants to go there.

We're introverted, socially maladjusted, depressive, and will likely die in poverty, perhaps achieving posthumous fame at a later date.

The reality for our sort is much more likely to end like a Lovecraft or Poe story than a Hallmark Channel romance: poverty, death, and possibly delirium at the end of it all.

This has been your Spot of Cheer for this episode of "Cie is a Fucking Depressive Hag, Never Have Tea With the Gloomy Bitch."