What is art to me?  I have been thinking about that a lot lately.  

Art to me is beautiful even if it’s ugly. 

Or maybe it is pretending to be something that it is not.  

 

What is art?  

What is beauty?  

What is Ugly?  

What is it but an expression of life on a page

With no constraints?

 

What is art to you?  

Who are you to me?  

What does that have anything to do with art or anything, really?

 

There is no Art School, 

Said, “They”

But who are “They” to you

And who are you to “They”?

 

Oh, what does it mean to be lost in your own expression,

Like drowning in a dream?

 

Sometimes words cannot convey,

What anything may seem.

 

Lately, I feel like I have been set free.

A fleeting butterfly sprung from a cage,

I loved catching butterflies as a kid.

 

Maybe I can start making things I like without feeling pressure.

I once won a medal for painting a tree in water-color

And I remember it glistening with fresh paint

Slowly drying from air and sun.

 

Art is a reflection of my life and what I am.  I am my art.

But, that’s just me.

What is art to you?

And who are you, anyways?

Do you think I care?

Because, Sir or Madame,

Like the universe, 

I am indifferent.

Or maybe there’s an ambition to play

Some vigilante artist for hire.

I always ask myself, what if my art is never good enough.

What if it ever was?

What does that matter to me?

Why should I care?

Like the universe I am indifferent.

As indifferent as Camus’s Stranger.

What about the stranger in that other story who

Of the man who visited his mother and sister

Only to be swept in a tornado of deception and murder?

Do you know that story?  How did it go, again?

I knew the story once, but time has made it a butterfly,

fleeting as fast as it flutters

until it’s just a story and it’s gone.

 

There are too many stories to climb.

There are too many mountains to mount.

Too many oceans spread wide.

Too much to bear like dust in the air.

Insanity is the devil counting the sand.

Until nothing makes sense anymore.