Young Poets

[rowens]

I read somewhere that anyone that's creating anything, writing, painting, is doing it to literally get out of Hell. You look at that as an educated adult and that's simply not true. But in the saying of it, you can feel that it might become true. And there's a difference between being utterly heartbroken and severely depressed. I think you know what I mean. Your girl Sylvia didn't put her head in an oven because she was a sad young woman, but because she couldn't feel anything but that constant overwhelming gnawing of something urgently on its way but that she knew would never come again. Depressed young people might appear like typical angst, but they're cursed to know that about themselves, and don't have quite the same release as others when it comes to youthful rebellion and cynicism, they see things more harshly, and experience things more intensely since things are now compared to the voids that they've known. But no need to get mired by neurotic doubt or shame. Keep yourself out of Hell! By any means necessary. And if you have to go there, make an adventure of it, keep the poet alive, because anyone that can make form out of a void is useful here. Let that motivate you if it ever comes back to a time when nothing else can. There's always a need for someone to show how it can be done. Let yourself be bored or your soul splayed in all agonizing directions for decades if it comes to it, as long as each time death offers you the knife you can say, in any style of voice at all, "If you want me you're going to have to take me!" you've proved you're still worthy of being a voice in this world.