In Art We Trust
I: Warning
I felt this north-star impulse
From the very first day of life,
Absorbing the world's experiences
In hand my pen - a knife!
Given a gift that sang
Of sweetness, life at ease
I accepted praise with nonchalance
'til Adulthood took me.
Still I drew and sewed and wrote
With love and careless joy;
And then something deep inside of me
This gift it did destroy.
A man that I had thought I loved
Learned all my special skills
And when he then took them on,
Each was a little kill.
Deaths they were, every one,
But I couldn't see it then.
Instead I locked her up, my artist,
Who begged to hold a pen.
From here it was just a tiny step
Of giving up my gifts,
And then perversely what I did
Was wish and wish and wish.
My dreams, they were all the same
I still yearned to own those things,
Yet I could not bring myself
To release my given wings.
Gradually time disappeared
And with what I had I worked;
I worked and worked and worked and worked;
Creatively, I broke.
Each gift that God had given me
I systematically returned,
Until the day had come to pass
I yearned and, spurned, I squirmed.
My artist had been locked up
In a cellar twenty years,
The walls contained her fingertips,
The floor a sea of tears.
I'd failed to accept
That I was worthy of a gift -
Refused to see I could be Art, that it
Wasn't lifelong grift.
Now I sit in morning light,
An altar to my right.
Pages, pens in front of me:
Now I live to write.
A channel of the Gods I see
In poetry that flows;
Heedless, easy, love-inspired,
My creativity, it grows!
I thought I'd given it all away,
Lived a life too long, too late;
Instead I'd simply had to pay
To offload an enormous weight.
The Fates will have their way with you,
Even studiously ignored:
The gifts you're given are always kept
In a lined ledger record.
They'll follow you from birth
Until you hear your soul urge song,
They'll poke you in the back
Until you seek to right your wrong.
The limitations that you have
Are buried deep, and low:
Tap-rooted into aquifers
Impeding heart's true flow.
The monsters that you see
Around you are actually inside
That deep, dark cavern in which you
Have tried so hard to hide.
Until you slay them that is,
The monsters who keep you
Running from your artist's cries,
That child you stabbed right through.
So look at all those lovely gifts
Sitting on that huge Returns Desk:
Pick them up, one by one,
Lest you turn become a wreck.
Don't do the thing that I have done,
Living lifetimes, lifetimes over
In anguish because you refused to play
More than an artistic broker.
Heed my call, and learn it well:
Your art will have its day.
The question that you have to ask is,
Will you let it have its way?
II: Attachment
The spirit of attachment
Is so deep that you can
Live your life in reflection
Of others without
Even realising
That your own mirror
Has become so burnished
That it can no longer
See the sun.
III: Feel Abandoned
In the flaming moment
Of true abandonment,
One realises that
Genuine self-reliance
Feels like breathing for yourself
For the first time.
It's painful and isolating.
It's a freedom that smacks
You in the face with an
Unbridled, cold, wintery wind.
It's a choice of here or there,
But only in relation to Self.
Unrestrained but unmoored,
Afloat sans destination,
A life,
Alive,
Yet dead in relation to others.
IV: Colour
Light-struck,
The object
refracts
reflects
bounces
Some complex array of
Spectra
Filtered by collision
Collapsed by observation
Defined by cognition.
Slapping rushhh of humantide
Obscured from even in-tune ears
In mind a
whirrrrrrr
click
thump
A collective of individuation
Whose rhythms beat out the
Percussion of the universe
Layers of bass beats thumping madly
A misty aura of collective noise
Heartbeats and gurgles and blood and goop
Jamming in endless audio loop.
The powerful energy continues its pump
While the surface is splaying
In split
In crrrr--
-UMP
EnVisioned in a spectrum
A finite slice of life
Humans see the smallest of small spheres of light.
Stare at a screen, millions of colours
Ignoring the real world, that mundane other
That splits and defines based on what we see
... and the jam just continues as we be who we be.
Author's Note
This work is clearly not a story. It doesn't come close to meeting Reedsy's story requirements, but the prompt was fun to play with. Hi, I'm Leticia and I'm currently working in poetic form. Part I of this piece emerged in response to the prompt. Parts II and III pre-existed, but they fit. Here's how I see them fitting: In order to recover your artistry after a long life of ignoring it (and thus becoming addicted to other things, like work), you have to face a whole lot of demons. One of those is the demon named Attachment. The other is the demon named Individualism. Many artists are afraid of their art because they're afraid they have to live alone: That myth of the solo artist is strong in Western culture, often because living as an artist is simultaneously idolised and derided. The resulting dissonance causes us to jerk away from it. Part IV was channelled sometime in the past year, and it is such a beautiful way to think about the emergence of art. It's wild, untamed, untamable. Being ok with being wild is so important to us.
If you like my work, please consider buying it! My latest collection, Artist in Recovery was released on 4 November via Lionstower/Mount Books and is available in That Huge Online Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named. But, as you can see, this artist is still very much in recovery mode! I hope you enjoyed it. x Leticia
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