Alison Fiebig

if it does not feed the fire of your creativity, then leave it.
if people and things do not inspire your heart to dream, then leave them.
if you are not crazily in love and making a stupid fool of yourself, then step
closer to the edge of your heart and climb where you’re forbidden to go.
debts, accusations, assaults by enemies mean nothing,
go where the fire feeds you.
turn your attention to the magic of whores, grief, addicts, and drunks, until you stumble upon
that shining halo surrounding your heart that will allow you to violate every fear happily,
be where you’re not supposed to be,
the love of an angel who’s caught your blood on fire again, who’s gulped all of you in one breath
to mix in her soul, to explode your brooding
and again, your words rush from the stones
like a river coursing down from some motherly mountain source
and if your life doesn’t spill forth unabashedly, recklessly, randomly
rushing in wonder at life,
then change, leave, quit, silence the idle chatter and do aay with useless acquaintances
who have forgotten how to dream
bitch rudely in your dark mood at the mediocrity of scholars who meddle in whimsy for academic t rifles -
let you be their object of scorn,
let you be their object of mockery,
let you be their chilling symbol
of what they never had the courage to do, to complete, to follow,
let you be the flaming faith that makes them shield their eyes
as you burn from all sides
taking a harmless topic and making of it a burning galaxy
or shooting stars in the dark of their souls,
illuminating your sadness, your aching joy for life, your famished insistence for God and all that is creative
to attend you as a witness to your struggle,
let the useless banter and quick pleasures belong to others, the merchants, computer analysts,
and government workers;
you haven’t been afraid of rapture among thieves, bloody duels in drunken brawls,
denying yourself the essence of our soul work
as poems rusted while you scratched at your heart to see if it was diamond and not cheap pane glass
now, then, after returning from one more poet’s journey
in the heart of the bear, the teeth of the wolf, the legs of the wild horse,
sense what your experience tells you,
your ears ringing with deception and lies and foul tastes,
now that your memory is riddled with blank loss,
tyrants who wielded their boastful threats to the sleeping dogs and old trees in the yards,
now that you’ve returned from men and women who’ve abandoned their dreams and sit around
like corpses in the grave moldering with regret,
steady your heart now, my friend, with fortitude
long-lasting enduring hope, and hail the early dawn like a ship off coast that’s come for you,
spent and ragged and beggared,
if what you do and how you live does not feed the fire in your heart and blossom into poems,
leave, quit, do not turn back, move fast away from that which would mold your gift,
break it, disrepect it, kill it.
guard it, nurture it, take your full-flung honorable heart and plunge it into the fire
into the stars, into the trees, into the hearts of others
sorrow and love and restore the dream
by writing of it’s again-discovered wild beauty.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.