Blackline Dispatch No. 004
The river’s gone quiet. Used to be I’d kneel at its banks and drink straight from the current—raw, reckless, the old gods hissing hymns through my teeth. Now? I carve prayers into dry riverbed stone. Build pyres of half-finished sonnets and exposed film, strike matches against my molars. Waiting for a spark that won’t come.
They’ve replaced the deep water with a drip feed. Create content, they say. As if art’s a faucet to wrench open, not a vein. You know what passes for depth now? Rehearsed vulnerability. Hashtags dipped in blood substitute. Every “masterpiece” a mirror polished to show exactly what the crowd wants bleeding.
I’m choking on the noise. The world won’t let you go quiet—not when there’s algorithms to feed, timelines to haunt, a million screens buzzing like locusts in your skull. Used to be a man could vanish into the work. Now the work demands you stand in the spotlight, grinning like a marionette while the strings cut deeper.
But here’s the rot they don’t smell: Even silent gods leave footprints.
So I keep building fires. Flicker of a charcoal sketch in a locked drawer. A shutter clicked at 3 a.m., no audience but the rats and the moon. Ink smeared on a diner napkin like a smuggled psalm. Maybe the river’s not dead. Maybe it’s just underground, moving in the dark where their metrics can’t measure the current.
I’ll bleed into the soil until it answers.
The cigarette’s down to the filter now. Smoke curls into a question mark. No answer comes.
But I’m still listening.
What are the signal fires for?
For gods that stopped answering. For the part of you that once listened. For the echo you still believe is coming back.Was the river ever real?
Yes. Or the memory of it was. Which is sometimes worse.What if no one sees the fire?
Then it burns cleaner. Then it means more.Why keep writing if the gods are silent?
Because silence is still a kind of answer.Creative disconnection isn’t always dramatic—it’s often a slow erosion. A quiet forgetting of what it once felt like to be truly lit from within.
This dispatch is for every artist who remembers the current and still dares to build toward it, even when the river runs dry.
Filed under Dispatch No. 004. The signal’s weak—but it’s still out there. Keep building fires.