Sit down.
I would like to speak.
What is art?
Stare it in the face.
See its cyclopean eyes look back
Infinite and brutal,
Terrifyingly intimate.
Reach out,
Hands uneven,
Body shaking,
And take it in your grasp.
Shock.
When I was twelve I wrote my first piece of writing longer than a school essay in a marbled notebook. It was fan fiction. It was ten pages of hastily scrawled fiction that couldn’t see the light of day. It was Star Wars. I threw it out. I’ve never made that mistake again. Backups, printouts, laminate.
Heartbeat.
I see it sometimes
Looming over me
Larger than life
Face alight with joy
As it sees me
Ant-like, tiny,
In the life it has met out for me.
Shock.
I drowned my sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. I saw life as nothing but a trip towards doom, and I thought I could leave a mark on a large Internet community. I took rips every day and gassed myself up in as many ways as I could. I lied to myself. I posted. I found out my deafening mediocrity. Months later, I quit the bottle. I never stopped writing.
Heartbeat.
I can stare myself
In the drawn and haggard state
I was when that beast
Put its misbegotten finger
Inside my heart.
Only then did I learn
What I was meant to be.
Shock.
I placed the blade of the knife against pale and ordinary skin. I’m covered with freckles and my mind races at what could happen, at extracting what beats below. I looked around my room, at the symbols of my own mediocrity. What caught my eye? The painting made by my childhood neighbor. I remember my mother told me he died of throat cancer. What really happened? He shot himself in the throat. This is what he left. I start to cry. I put the knife down.
Heartbeat.
What is art?
It is many things
It is stygian blue waves
Lashing at my very core.
Snapdragons lilting
In the too-hot summer breeze.
Aztec gods
With wiry necks and feather-light fingers
Ripping me apart.
A train bearing down
Tracks in a wavering Nebraska cornfield
In the blistering heat of the 1980’s.
I found these things
In the pits of my life.
Deep, dark, dynasties of depression
Exploding inside my mind.
Sustaining me.
I feel them in my footsteps
The weight bearing down on me
Easier, lighter.
I look down at my calloused hands
That have held those I love
Those I hate
And know exactly what they should be used for.
Shock.
Sometimes I cry. I do it more often now, great gouts of tears falling down cheeks stained by cement dust and pockmarked with acne I cannot solve. I let my emotions out in waves, letting them slither across my heart and clutch it when they need be. But I do not cry all the time. Only when I find something worthy. Like this.
Heartbeats.
I sit down
At a glowing screen
Filtering out
The blue and wasted waves.
I settle fingers on the keyboard,
And it settles with me
Tracing my existence.
No longer haunting.
No longer tragic.
A whole.
A gripping tragedy
A disgusting exultation.
A marvelous description.
I feel it settle
On my back
Embracing me
With photometric legs
And crystalline eyes
Reflecting back
What I do
With its hands.
Shock.
Heartbeats.
Shock.
Heartbeats.
That is art
My muse
My beast
My parasite
My love
Forever and ever.
To everyone who bought me here, and put their hands on mine at the keyboard, you've made me weep happy tears which has become quite easy to do. Thank you.