Phony | Beauty in the Mask: Poem Explained
Summary
In Bangwing IN the announcement explains the poem Phony | Beauty in the Mask, exploring the cover's 00:00 motif and a cassette tape with flowers as symbolism. It outlines stanza shifts from I to Broken to They to You and examines the central question do poets not care for their words after they heal. This deepens community understanding of the poem's themes and artistic choices.
Hey everyone... I just wanted to share something personal about the poem I published yesterday.. Phony | Beauty in the Mask.
So if you look at the cover there is this tiny "00:00" at the bottom which I put there because it represents both the beginning and the end of something like when you hit record and when you stop you know? And in the center, there is this cassette tape with flowers on it which is kind of my way of showing the beautiful world that poets create. The whole cover is basically meant to be a recording of someone's poem but here's the thing the poet stopped writing new stuff when he healed so all we have left are these old recordings.
There's this line in the fifth stanza that really gets to the heart of everything. "Do poets not care for their words after they heal?" That question is basically what the whole poem is about. it's about a reader and a poet who just... stopped writing. In the second stanza, I wrote "I call it comfort cause its not mine to keep" and that's about how the poet's words are addictive and comforting, but they are borrowed. Like, you can't expect someone to stay broken just for your comfort right?
Since the cover is a tape recorder I wanted each stanza to feel like different episodes or tracks. You can actually feel how it smoothly shifts from "I" to "Broken" to "They" to "You" its like listening to different parts of the same story unfold.
The title "Phony" means false or not real and it refers to how the broken person's words arent really meant for us they are just him trying to comfort himself with intimacy and metaphors. It gives comfort to readers but only for a short time and what happens when you become addicted to this and he just stops writing? At the end "Now my world is empty, I gave it all away" shows this journey from when the speaker was confused about what to write using sky and ocean as metaphors but still unable to write like someone truly broken. Then he gives all his love to this broken person's empty world through their empty art, and now he is broken too.
"Beauty in the Mask" that subtitle is about how all these sad poems are really for the readers not the authors. Empty art is everything but with nothing inside. Its a world of beauty, beauty of words but there's no one else there anymore.
