The artists’ way.

If paintings could come to life

Id step into Van Gogh’s Bank of the Oise at Auvers

Perch myself atop a faded wooden boat

and  gaze at the picturesque city that delighted Gogh’s brushes

 

If a poem could carry life

Id awaken Emily Dickison’s

“Because I could not stop for death” 

To let my feet have a brush of the quivering dews 

That orchestrated a funeral in her brain

 

Maybe I would travel back 

Many and many a year ago

To the kingdom by the sea

And meet the maiden Annabel Lee

Who with Edgar Allen Poe found love

Coveted by the winged seraphs

 

Or maybe I would meet them 

Gogh, Dickinson and Poe

And seek to know how it is 

To lay down one’s life for art

 

Gogh’d reserved mental energy 7 days

For ‘La Mousme’ 

But maybe his reserves ran out

Because they heard a gunshot one afternoon 

In the picturesque town of Auvers

A shot to the head and the dutiful fingers that painted

World famous daisies

Painted his shirt with blood

If you looked a little closer 

At The Starry Night that sit atop our mantels

You would see that it is an east facing view 

Of a mind seeking escape from an asylum 

And if you read between the lines of Dickinson’s 

 thousand and eight hundred poems

You would find that death was her closest companion

But it was poor ol Poe who spent his final hours

Conversing with spectral and imaginary objects on walls

 

Because you see 

An artist to practise his art, must sacrifice his heart

Oh and more, he lay down his sanity

 

So if I could meet them

Gogh, Dickinson and Poe

 I would ask 

If they ever saw the light again 

If words and colors overtook their senses

If the passion is worth the pain

 

I would ask them 

If death will give me a name

For it seems like the artists’ way. 

 

to breathe.

When I was eight I wrote a poem about pain like a stone

Because we had moved from our pretty house to a neighborhood foreign to my eyes

When I was ten I carved my heart out through a pen

All the loss of missing a mother splattered on paper

When I was twelve I fell in love with essays

I found it hard to find full stops for an end to words

When I was fourteen I kept two diaries because I found out

Words were a necessity for my survival

When I was sixteen the last page of my every notebook

Was splattered with poems and thoughts that couldn’t stay still

Today you say I am too deep for you, too dark

I think too much; I live in sighs

But how can I explain to you

That it is not for greatness, not out of want

It is my basis of survival rooted in my veins

Not for applaud or choruses

But to breathe

How can I explain how poetry invigorates me

Give me rain and a poem and I will forget existence

Give me a pen and a paper and I will forget you

And if I seem too deep too much too far

Leave me be

My words will take me home.