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