I like to draw. I like to put the tip of my pencil to a fresh sheet of cartridge paper, thick and lightly textured. I like to watch my hand move, forming images on the page.
It's amazing what gets created, jumping out at you from the page, with only a few strokes and smudges of graphite. In a few moments you can create a rose, limply drooping, that clings to the last vestiges of life, having been picked as a bud. A few moments more and a hand holds that rose, lightly bleeding where the thorns have pricked and broken skin. In a matter of minutes a body can be attached to that hand, a beautiful girl, or perhaps it is a boy.
Does it really matter?
It is the face that tells the story, lovely yet at the same time horrendous. They look to the flower, confused, and pained, but curious.
They seem to ask, "Why do you make me bleed? You are beautiful; I merely wanted to capture that beauty for a while. I wished to hold it in my hands, possess and covet it. Why do you make me bleed?"
The rose answers, "You too are beautiful and you did not need my beauty. You are greedy to ask for more. In your greed, you have condemned me to an early death. In return I wished to take some of your own loveliness. The expression on your face, is it not beautiful? The pain, the questioning, the ignorance? I find these things beautiful, so I make them flow with your life essence. Now we are even."
The face remains the same, the expression not changing, horrific that it does not alter in understanding.
Once a drawing is created, you see, it cannot change. The pencil marks do not move themselves to answer questions or transform expressions.
This is why I like to draw.
I prefer to write, although drawing and writing are essentially the same thing, you know.
When you write you draw pictures too, except those pictures are letters that form words. Those words form sentences from which we generate meaning.
Writing a poem is a lot like drawing a person. You follow a structure, dictated by an ancient scholar or reality accordingly, and you create within the rules.
But you don't have to.
A poem does not have to rhyme, a poem does not have to be fourteen lines.
Likewise, a person does not have to be proportioned, their face need not be perfect, in order to be beautiful. Look at Picasso, doing as he pleased with eyes, nose, and mouth, creating malformed faces like those from Chernobyl. A tragic genetic accident, or a liberation of the human form?
As I think these things I write them down, or draw them.
Either way it doesn't matter.
Either way it is only pencil strokes on a page, and these are merely my thoughts.