Short Stories, Long Odds

Art finds a way, despite all of my attempts to stifle it, whether intended or not. For a long time my entire identity revolved around being An Artist, and I was crazy about that feeling of exhilarating creation. I would make art for the sake of doing so, I would make art because it felt cool, and I would make art (every great once in a while) because people paid me to do so.

Along the way I participated in a number of collectives, various projects to which people would contribute stories or music or drawings or what have you and then have them exhibited in some way. The product of one such project was a challenge to write a poem based on a line from another poem. I got Edna St. Vincent Millay:

but last year’s bitter loving must remain

…and I produced the following, which I think may have been the first fiction poem I’d ever put together. I’ve always liked it, not because it hits that tuning fork in my artistic balls that sounds when I know I’ve really knocked something out of the park, but rather because it is simple and solidly built and it works:

we have gone too far
to turn back;

more people depend more
on our love than
even we do:

my mother would be crushed,
your father would say he told you so,
your older sister would cry
slow, burning tears;

your mother would be delighted,
my father wouldn’t be surprised,
my younger brother would know
affirmation of his fears;

and so last year’s bitter loving must remain

better for that
to be a secret
than for our apathy
to be common knowledge

It is rare that I produce something I think I’m satisfied with, and this one falls into that category. It won’t ever launch ships or suns but it accomplished a mission, which I think is an end-goal in art that people sometimes forget about in the doing of things.

When I’m trying to find my way back to writing, I usually turn to things like this, stuff that was very much made from the tool box and has very little Unicorn Magic Muse Powder sprinkled all over it.  Especially in writing music, sometimes turning to the really big, really complicated stuff was too scary. There was just as much creativity as craft in those things, and creativity isn’t just a window you can simply look in on, even if you built the house.