The Highest Art

I have this deep ache.  It never quite abates.  Quietly moaning, lip biting, teeth clenching, deeply sighing... groaning ache.  Sometimes it's in my chest, pressing, sitting, on my heart.  Other times it's deep, down in my guts, squeezing, twisting, refusing to be still.  It's in the tightness of my neck and shoulders, the flexing and clenching of fingers, and curling of toes.  It's stuck in my hair, where my fingers run through, pulling for the fifteenth time this hour.  It's in my throat, overflowing in a groan that is more of a desperate whimper.

It is my stifled creativity.  It is my story, untold.  It is my painting, trapped in the acrylic tubes.  It is the deepest pain that I cannot.  cannot seem to ease.  Writing, drawing, painting, reading... it feels like bleeding, a superficial attempt at easing something that is so much deeper than I am willing to access... to free.  And so I clench my teeth, curl my toes, and wimper the quietest, most desperate rue. 

Enraged again

she lashes out

"power hungry patriarch!"

wicked childhood chains that bind her

she'd kill to break them, but she's afraid

afraid - that she'll find she's not as strong

as she thought she was 

And what is it that is wanting to so badly to be set loose?  I don't know.  "I don't know," I whine. "What is it?" I plead -
 I lie really. 
Because I am not really offering to free it... I still want mostly to make it go away. 
I am afraid of it.  I know what it is.  Really. 

lashed again into submission, blood and tears run down her face

nerves racing spite her soul's supression,

            someday she will leave this place -

   someday... Someday she will Burn this place

spent and lifeless, her heart still beats and her soul still burns

she screams inside - her terror's turned

into a violent anger unafraid she breaks her chains 

It's me.  It's my purpose, my self, my point of existence... outgrown of it's safe box, falling off the shelf, leaning against the closet door, desperately, but mindlessly begging to be let out.  It's lost, doesn't really know what it's asking for anymore.... just repeating... something that meant something once.

her thrashing slows, the screams subside

dying into a sickening kind of muffled whimper.

... and rising in the throes of rage she swings and misses... 

The me that I know, that everyone knows, being merely the practical jailer.  The sensible, the polite, the mannered, and conformed.  The one that knows better than the wide eyed, uncensored, child like creature of passion, teller of tall and small tales... the one who points at taboos, exclaiming, "Look at THAT!"  The one social outcast, sticking out her tongue at the backs of the numbed, zombie like, followers of polite culture.  The one who corrects grammar rather than wincing.  The one who snorts at utilitarian, hipster art, offends with honesty, and laughs at dismissal. 

and the last thing she sees as she hears the resounding crack of her skull...

the last thing she sees as he leans over 

her lifelessness and stares into her bloodshot eyes

is her own face.

It is a scary dangerous creature that wants it's rightful place inside my head and on my tongue... behind my typing fingers and holding my repressed creativity.

It is a soul fighting desperately to be whole and unbound.  To be unchained by society.  To be cage. free.  Undefended.  Vulnerable.  Honest and unadulterated, undebased, uncorrupted... extricated from preformed bullshit.

I know this because I was this creature once.  Most of us were.  It rears it's unacceptable head in toddler tantrums over autonomy, and mismatched but absolutely favored clothes... in the pained abandon of teen angst and desperate rebellion, and the mostly crushed spirit behind the dissent whispered in the break room. 

It is behind the uncomfortable comments of the elderly - dismissed as adled and acceptably inappropriate. 

It is the real self,  the one that is capable of actual magic, that we are so hell bent on hiding and ridiculing in others.  For what does a soul, set free, have to actually fear?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  Set free it rises above the control of shame, fear, and embarrassment - it is obnoxiously colored, ridiculously mismatched - dangerous as all hell to the status quo. 

Undesirable No. 1 to those winning the game of pointless conformation.

It is brave beyond all bravery to be this. 

If society had fingers instead of claws

covered with tender skin

it wouldn't be so dangerous

to bite the hand that feeds you.* 

And pain, inescapable, to deny it to the lighted soul.


 *Neurocide