write something deep and sad

i have just read a poem by a dear friend, and it is wonderful. it is one of those rare moments where a poem houses a soul. we hope all poems have soul, but they don't that intangible line between vulnerability and strength, between maintaining a proud facade, and letting it crumble around your feet.

there are moments, this is one of them, moments when the vulnerability of another is a vessel of healing and the waters run down my forehead and a laugh and cry simultaneously. laugh, for the truth of it. cry, for the truth of it.

i am surrounded by brilliance on all sides. sometimes that brilliance is diminished by the effects of time, or life. my brother, a brilliant artist, who does not believe himself to be such. poet after poet, i could spend hours naming who do not believe their work necessarily of merit. in doubt, they stab the pen at the page and scuttle the papers away in a drawer, until they dust them off and i get to see them briefly.

but my praise is not enough, it seems to encourage them to venture out, to share those works, those soul wrought works. there are other considerations.

i was driving yesterday and it came to me, there are a great many writers who make a living at this, who fashion a way of sustaining some semblance of a life by the word. they live the dream, some would say.

but i wonder, do they?

if those books stacked one on top of the other tower to the sky and they lack soul, conviction, strength, are they not lost before they are found?

this is the issue then, can one be a dedicated artist and make a living.

of course. anything is possible.

have i seen it in my own life?

nope. not once.

the artists of soul i know, have a day job and write because they must.

they do not write because it will put food on the plate and a roof overhead. though that is not for lack of trying.

i do not diminish the working writer in the least, rather, i applaud them.

my question is, how to keep soul in tact, soul in work, soul in the market place.

can it be done.

i simply do not know. from what i have seen of critic and publisher, market and best-sellers, i do not think it can happen. and that troubles me. i like to believe it can. i want to be proven wrong.

merton would seem an argument against my point.

but i do not speak of the famous gone. i speak of the struggling now.

i guess my greatest fear would be that if i tried to milk poetry for a living, that i would lose the willingness to fail. i would lean so heavily upon it to succeed, to shape it, to form it, to make it acceptable in the moment, that i would, invariably kill it. perhaps that is my shortcoming alone.

i do not know.