Pressure. We all feel it. The CEO is expected to be constantly brilliant, witty, savvy. The bankers are required to be consistent, accurate, professional. Artists are expected to be aloof, depressed, enlightened. We are all expected to produce results. I’ve noticed that when you’re an artist, it’s considered arrogant, over-dramatic, and simple to identify yourself as such. It seems that to call myself an artist, instantly invalidates the claim. It’s so much more politically correct to identify the specific area in which I express myself. Am I an artist? Of course not…we don’t have any more of those…we have painters, authors, poets, and animators.
Still, that isn’t the point of this little rant. I’ve noticed that no matter what title we’re given in life, we are required to produce the results that are attached to them. Poets feel the pressures of their peers, their families, their fans to continually use this arena to somehow try to enlighten the world, or at the very least break through perception barriers. If I write a happy poem because I happen to be in a happy mood, it is interpreted, and intellectualized, and frankly neutered until the whole real point of the poem, which was simply to put a smile on your face, is lost in medical jargon, and hypothetical rhetoric.
If we stop producing what has become expected of us, we are accused of either being under the weather, performing below our ability level, or that perhaps we were just a fad to begin with. Why is that? Why can’t I be a poet, who simply isn’t in the mood? I don’t understand why every time I take a break for maybe three or six months, I come back and the comments indicate some kind of relief that I’m writing again. As if there’s any need to worry if I don’t post something monthly, weekly, daily like other poets on here. I’m not knocking any of them, and please…before some of you begin, spare me the whole “If you’re a true poet, then it permeates your being. If you’re a true poet, you should be overflowing with poems.” True poets are people who are capable of voicing their inspiration through the given media of text. Let’s not make ourselves out to be more glamorous than we are.
How many poets on here vent time after time after time about the same old shit, and can’t seem to appreciate simply little miracles? Just because you have a PHD in Literature and Composition and you post here hourly, that doesn’t make you a poet. Give yourself a challenge and try writing just one poem about the miracle of the human body as a living machine. Try describing a blade of grass without using the word “green.” You want to write dark, depressing, frightening or shocking poetry, and you try to express violence in the most eloquent and “goth” way possible, but then have no understanding of the brutality that’s spawned most of these images. You use simple phrases like “stupid” or “unnecessary” to describe the murder and moral violations that humanity commits daily, but you can practically quote an entire thesaurus when it comes to your girlfriend dumping you? What’s wrong with you?
And there, I’ve made a hypocrite of myself. I talk about discarding the dogma that surrounds our given labels, but then assume that because someone on here isn’t my kind of poet that they might not be a poet at all. I think we’re all tainted and stained by different dogma. What if all of it was taken out of the equation? Would we all suddenly become savage grunting neanderthals? Or are some restrictions necessary? Perhaps morality in general might just be the perpetuation of our ancestors traditions and biases, but could we as a race, not a society, survive if there were none of those mental inhibitors? Would we not seek for some higher truth even if our parents had never told us to say our prayers each night before we go to bed? On the other side of the coin, would we embrace bigotry if it wasn’t for our teachers and politicians preaching equality? Again, I’ve made a hypocrite of myself. I’m talking here about taking away the dogma that I feel stifles the world while reassuring myself that some dogma must be necessary if we are to evolve.
If there was no hierarchy to life, and let’s not kid ourselves, we each have our superiors no matter how “equal” we’re all supposed to be, would we become a chaotic and anarchistic people, or would we actually find the truth that’s out there and still undiscovered due to the mental implants we all receive from birth?

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