To the artist coming home for the holidays:
Be strong on your way to your execution,
Like a bathing cub in the wild having a solid day
On its way to a bear trap, a claw of humiliation.
At first, hometowns are what they are: for home—
And mom’s lasagna is as cheesy as you remember
,And your room is still the way it was: a picture of Rome
Hanging on the wall and a polaroid of your family members.
Then it’s dinnertime and the lasagna tastes delicious,
Everything is delicious until the conversation is served.
“How’s your thing going?” they ask. And you’re suspicious
That they think you’re a failure since “trying” isn’t 1st.
It can feel pathetic to endeavor with ambition,
To risk living a life of fulfilling, dream-like favor,
While Uncle Jo and Auntie Susie deem it a superstition
That you could ever make money with your desired labor.
But don’t listen because you cannot play in the dark,
You cannot skateboard on their grass fields
Or sculpt the Hercules with sand at their park,
Or write about sunrise with windows sealed.
Yet: the light awaits, the wheels will be rolled
And no one has seen your Hercules or your sunrise.
Home is comfort, but there’s a reason we get old,
Choosing to leave all we know to increase in size.
Nothing ever happens here: upgrades without reroutes.
In town, the clothes get nicer, cars get faster, wallets thicken.
The bored chase the mediocre hunger of object. If south
They feel, they’ll go to the cycle of trends to no longer sicken.
Besides children, what gets created in this city?
Of course they make fun of you for your dreams
Because they haven’t had the courage to follow any—
They mean well, but they haven’t seen what gleams.
They will regard the pursuit of art as a last resort—
“Don’t waste your smarts, you could do law at Penn!”
And the lawyers during breaktime are the ones who sort
Through their phones: music, movies, literature to save them.
The craft of art requires passing the threshold of what man can afford.
So knows the ballerina of discipline unparalleled and joints pained.
So knows the pianist of the layered complexities of a single chord.
So knows the painter of anguishing subtlety and patience,
The cinematographer of torturous observation,
The actor of the impossibility of recreating sensation,
Or the writer’s page of soul translation.
And so we must dream there is a different table for us to sit,
Alongside the princes, the clowns, the legends who left town
Knowing it is beyond family, friends, even teachers to admit:
Our true voice is beyond us, beyond them, and beyond now.