I am a big believer in transforming our experience into narrative. Humans only understand themselves and the greater reality around them, through the stories they tell. We are all artists and writers trying to recount our personal histories. This process can go wrong though, if we take the process too seriously; if we begin to mistake the story for reality. Reality is the chaos of fate’s imagination. We should stop from time to time and step out of our narratives to take a look at the mess that was lost from our storytelling. That is what this poem is about. As always, this poem, as it appears here, is in first-draft format. In life, the first-draft is all we get. We leave a trail of first-draft scribbles. So let’s not be too hard on ourselves. The past is the best teacher we could have.
Let me know your thoughts on the poem and the ideas it tries to express. 🙂
Studio Floor love is the paint that’s spilt, not the brush-born story on the canvas love is the speckled landscape on the studio floor let us now walk that landscape together. we’ll begin in the colour of mountain stone wrapped in the living green always loved and follow the mottled path of childhood greys to find stains that look like sobs swept-up into the blood- red of a sunrise we’ll continue and sink into the colour of noise the buzz the seasons of little hands and cold toes where time hiccups and smells like salt and ice cream wrapped in sand and the white of gulls painted onto an incoming tide of dark skies and then we’ll find ourselves in a carnival of terrible dreams strangers to the path we’ve lost we’ll surrender to the colour of angry days to the colour of love alone without a hand to hold, without a reason to go on. that’s when we’ll find brush-born stories are never real holding colour hostage like sound boxed-in, like canvas on a gallery wall worn thin by the lies it tells that’s when we’ll find painted lines dug deep into the colour of our skin from the many days we spilt life onto the studio floor.