A Meditation on Art

While writing a poem this evening, I found myself confronted with the blindingly obvious idea of emotion. I always write my best poetry just straight up while feeling some sort of heightened emotion. Tonight it was confusion over a boy. A teenage girl being confused by a boy? I know, not so shocking, but the whole mess made me feel like writing a poem with a rather peculiar rhyme scheme. And my two best poems were written in the middle of near mental break downs because art is something that's drawn from a deep emotional concentration in my mind. I've never been able to write a decent poem while at peace and meditating on something that happened in the past. I have to be in the middle of it, aching and feeling it. I'm sure it's not good for my emotional status, but it's gotten me some damn good pieces of literature. And maybe that's why very few people are allowed to look at my writing. Every piece I write comes from a personal place. Somewhere in my soul where others aren't allowed to look, which is why it's weird that the first people who get to see it don't even know me. Only three people I know personally have ever gotten to read my work, and for good reasons. My poems reveal way more about my mental issues than most people really need to know, and my fiction stories are like desires pulled from my head and materialized on paper without ever actually being experienced. Letting someone who doesn't know me very well get this candid glimpse into my inner workings is like getting a caveman to fix your computer. It would just confuse the person and make them think I was crazy. Although I'm not a stable-minded individual, I'm not crazy. I just work differently than other people. It bothers me when people act agitated that I won't share my work with them. Sometimes I think if you're willing to share it openly and let everyone see it then you've either gotten over the issue addressed in the poem or it's not personal enough. And nine times out of ten, it's not personal enough. Because personal is pulling your emotion out like pulling stuffing out of a teddy bear and smearing it onto paper in some sort of dreamy, mystical way, and not everyone can do that and make it look good. Those who can become artists. Anyone can make art, but not everyone can be an artist.