napowrimo: on misery (day 14)

misery is a quiet resource; an unknown quantity of the unbridled that envelops every breath. your ribcage feels like a prison, the hurt beckons from the inside, calling out for company and you do your best to starve it. you pen a poem, you paint a little scene of your day, willing the hurt to flow into your fingertips and into your words & art, an epitaph for the misery.

you were the oasis, the empty vessel that life poured misery into; some people were just born sad, spending the rest of their days feigning a smile while pursuing their own happiness, some were born perpetually happy (they had to have been new souls not yet jaded by life, or old souls that were finally on the last leg of their journey), and the rest were born blank states, left to be molded solely by life and circumstances.

i think most poets and artists suffer from the same ailment, tortured by memories, coping the only way we know how. kindling the misery to infinitely bleed on canvasses & parchments and hoping the pain stops there. it does for a little while but our hearts feed from a reservoir of hurt.

to be a poet or an artist must be an ailment in itself; dissecting misery to shape it into a beautiful arrangement. an entity in itself, forever screaming the words you couldn’t muster the strength to say.

visual: https://imgur.com/yUS4cCJ