I vocally moan
Reading my past words
Published to the stranger
A motherly instinct arises
To nurture that little girl in the mirror
I suppose that’s the pain my own mother must live with
Wise enough to know
That her words pushed me the other way
That rules were meant to break
That I just hadn’t yet learned
Which confines to respect
“Anti-everything”
was the only option at the time
One cannot love without differentiating
Without living and choosing their own moral path
I dropped out of art school.
I always thought artists had to be fucked up to create
I read in Art and Fear that the artist only creates when the pain of not creating supersedes the pain of creating.
But the pain of not creating only really comes when the pain of living supersedes the joy.
When meaning is lost
so we must turn to the page
To find something within ourselves
To understand what makes us different
But we’re all different, yet dependent on each other
Yet somehow democracy and justice
Have formed a negative correlation
An open-minded skeptic.
An optimistic anarchist.
The alchemist.
She/her they/them and the evident
Labels that shouldn’t need to exist
Polarized into socially constructed confines
The world has been simplified
Into a grain of salt
As seasoning for their homemade salad dressing
While Toni waits at the corner
Outside CVS
For a human
Beneath the mask
Beneath the mustard-colored scarf
I was removing from my neck
Before she asked me where I got it
I told her my mother gifted it to me
My first Christmas in New York.
She told me to keep it
And to love my mother
She called me Erin
And asked me about my life
And she saw me clearly and I saw her
Through her light brown wrinkled eyes
Opened wide
The words used to describe joy
Love
Are limited
And often resemble loss
And fear
I abandon my creativity in those moments
For the English language
Doesn’t do justice
To the depth of my emotions.
When it’s dark, it’s easy
To isolate, yet connect.
While the very word magic
Implants an image of a rabbit in a top hat
Of falsity and foolery and deceit.
I suppose that explains my creative gap.
And my creative block in this moment.
I choose to use simple words
Just as we’ve chosen to process through categorization
How we see white as the inverse of black
Dog as the inverse of cat
Right-brained as the inverse of left.
We are told we cannot be both
Intralatterally paralleled
That we must choose our path as children
And have a plan for our future
But the future is just a summary of the day
And the day is a summary of a bunch of hours
But haven’t you noticed that hours cannot be measured
That metric is just another man-made category
My father always told me
Time is the most valuable thing in this world
But if time doesn’t exist
What else have I been fed, and thus, have I lived by and idolized in this figure?
This beautiful figure
That prompts me to ask that very question?
Whereas those who are not prompted are instead told
And told
And told
Without questioning the origin
Without acquiring the flexibility
To shift, through experience.
To be part of the whole
To balance the universe
It disappoints me that the last three lines I wrote have been cliched into losing meaning.
That true meaning cannot be dictionized.
That the essence of communication has been simplified into words.
When was the last time you hugged a stranger?
Unfortunately, most children are taught that rules are meant to be followed.