The Unreliable Narrator

I think about the tortured artist a lot.

The idea of turning pain into art.

Taking sorrows, ugly feelings,

moulding them like dirty, wet clay

’til they form a shape that means something. 

I wonder if it becomes cyclical too.

Artists, writers, tend to exaggerate,

you can’t simply translate thoughts to page—

no one would read it.

So you add colour. You add a soundtrack.

Place a teardrop on a page, a bruise on the mind's eye.

Until art and artifice blur together.

You’re writing epithets for your father in the notes app,

memories turn to sprawling hyperbole.

‘Oh that’s a good one,’ you think.

‘Is that what it is? Is that what it was?’

You write the words. You make the art. You add the colour. 

You sit on the floor of your shower when you’re done

and wait for the feeling of catharsis that once came so easily. 

You think about the tortured artist 

and wonder if it’s cyclical.