source: pinterest
It’s 1 am
How do I do something no one has ever written
Write something no one has ever done
Outstandingly creative or ingenious
That gets the reader stuck on its pages and lessons
A real page- and life-turner
That remains evergreen even when my hair turns grey
Something that will cost some sweet sweat
The kind that precedes a particularly delightful rest
The kind that only comes after rock-hard labour
This is the question I keep asking
At 4:30 am
This is the eternal curse of the artist
That high bar we have set for ourselves
That forever keeps us below the scientist
That high bar we never attain to
That makes a mockery of us before the scientist
Whose life is so simple
A very theoretically pragmatic mix of principles
No matter how actually chaotically inadequate this mix is
We forever fawn over our inferiority before them
The scientist who needn’t rise beyond his senses
The scientist who needn’t read between the lines of this piece
The scientist whose neurons fire away in peace
We artists be forever murdering ourselves
Suiciding and homiciding all through life
The artist wakes up every morning with a hammer to the head
He then picks at the pieces with long nails
Same nails he used to scratch his itchy under a night before
He scatters the bits with his scrawny feet
So bony from years of starvation
Because inspiration did not give 50 kobo if he survived
In a world of indie publishing, miscellaneous blogging and facebooking
He peers with eyeballs painfully straining hard
For something beyond the senses
Something truly beautiful
That could not have come from among those neurons and equations
Something more than a mockery of his senses
Writing simply as his eyes have seen or ears heard
He has to spin the magical into it
He cannot paint that drab leaf the way it is
The leaf has to look like a flower
A glorious flower nobody has seen before
source: favim.com
The artist has to produce a work of wonder
A work that the senses have to adore
A work the scientist has to bow before in awe
Make no mistake the scientist works hard
Starting from the imagination
Creating a complex question
But he then turns the simplistic way
Reduces the wonder to a series of observations and equations
The scientist has his own merits
But,
The artist has to dig into the supernatural
He has to bridge the realms of the seen and unseeable
He has to produce a wonder
The scientist did not know existed
In a way that could not be explained by equations and mere observations
Using tools the scientist did not know existed
He looks at the simple elements
Eats them all up
Regurgitates lying down
Whilst the scientist scorns
Calling him a lazy goat
Who cannot handle the rigours of elaborate farm work
Only to produce a wonder the same scientist can apprehend
And adore with his own senses
A world beyond mere observations and simple equations of life.
I Feel Shadows 