The Studio

Strangers would be surprised,
that you, so orderly and neat,
always organized,

would have a room like this,
scattered with paintings and sketches,
art with no theme hanging randomly,

piles of ideas, brushes, boxes of paint,
candles, magazines, and a brass kaleidoscope
that sits beautifully out of place on your table.

Nothing here is finished,
a mish mash of possibilities and promises,
of beauty unmade, yet always on the brink,

a room not hidden, but somehow unseen.
Even visitors to your house seem to avoid it
as if the chaos was somehow catching,

no one seeing the deepest truth,
that always, it seems, the things we love the most
are messy.

About the poem

There is an old adage that “creativity is messy.”. And, in my mind, so is love. That’s where the poem came from.

And the picture? That’s my studio, taken five minutes before I posted this poem. Long time readers have seen other pictures of my house, generally orderly. This room, like my heart, however, rarely is.

Tom