César A. Cruz, a Mexican poet, once said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Art is the great equalizer that lures both us eccentrics and the regular folks toward a common ground. It celebrates the organized chaos of the disturbed and leads them to catharsis. It awakens the fire still smoldering in the hearts of the comfortable and shows them how to find peace among the twisted unknown. All our paths lead to the same destination. Some of us just have a more convoluted line to get there.

Some of us make art to feel something. Some of us make art to toss a feeling out as far as we can, never to be seen again. Art can help you avoid bottling things up by forcing you to confront them, feel them, and reproduce them in your medium of choice. It can hold a lens up to your darkest fears and deepest desires in a way that the outside world can see and understand. It leaves your heart exposed and naked to be regarded and appreciated. It allows you to revel in the deliciously painful way it ties some people’s stomachs into knots instead. As an observer, you need to open your mind to the journey the message wishes to bring you on.

Art fertilizes the seeds of emotion that lay dormant below the surface of our society — what we’re afraid to feel and become, what we’re afraid to lose and gain. Every individual’s perception is as unique as their fingerprint. Our emotions are products of our memories, values, and experiences.

Two people can stand in front of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and have wildly different emotions spring from them. One feels a pang of annoyance when a memory of stocking grocery shelves at work pops into their mind. Another gets a warm, fuzzy feeling remembering how her mother used to make her tomato soup when she was sick. Even the person standing just behind them with skeptical eyes and crossed arms, who insists to his friends that he doesn’t see the point of these, happens to get a few cans of soup at the supermarket the next day for the first time in years after a seemingly random craving.

I still like blasting the saddest Joy Division songs in existence and dancing around my living room to return to my baseline when the world feels like too much. When I was in high school, my mother would frown whenever she would hear my “sad music.” She would ask, “Why do you listen to that sad music? I don’t like how it makes me feel.” Isn’t that the point? We’re on level ground now. Now you understand exactly where my baseline is and what that feels like.

Much have I travell’d through the realms patrolled

by gunmen, many broken countries seen;

of storied northern city had we dreamed

which Wall Street magnates do for Mammon hold.

Oft of stacked green bills, food have I been told

by smugglers selling boats from this domain,

so never did I surrender that dream

till I heard Adams speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like New York was just too full

to offer safety, clothing, or a bed.

Like that, I stopped. I felt the homeward pull,

missing drug cartels, starvation, brutal men.

I blithely turned back south as Adams headed

for his tour, with press, of Darien.

I love this idea, and i'll tell you why

My G-d am I disturbed

All my colleagues know it.

I'll play music of the insane while I cut meat

Die Antwoord, Rob Zombie...

I tell them it relaxes me.

It's a half truth

It's because the energy of this music

Matches my internal reality

It synchronizes with the rhythm of my internal madness

And in that way, it is soothing.

I don't know if that's why some art comforts the disturbed

While that same art disturbs the comfortable...

No wait! I do know!

The comfortable are disturbed by art that soothes the disturbed...

Because it reminds them of a piece of themself they have yet to integrate

If you have not integrated your shadow

You may fear it

I mean...I dunno...

Bunch of punk ass bitches, haha.

It's hard for me to imagine art that would disturb me

There is no art more disturbing than life itself

If you don't see that

Then man

You haven't lived.

"I don't know about that."

"It's better than it looks."

Trust, not blind but with skepticism.

The worst part of the hike is the rope, I've never done this one before, and for some reason I go first. It takes a while to figure out how to climb up the twenty foot near-vertical face that's so eroded the dirt footholds have turned to slippery sand, and the ledge by the tree that's holding the rope seems like a mantle to nowhere, so instead I go left and once to flatter ground I promptly sit to collect myself. I don't look down the hundreds of feet drop below. It's better not to.

"It'll be better on the way down, right? There's nothing else like this on the route, is there?"

"No."

No to what, I wonder.

Merrily we hike, an endless ridge, granite towers, purple flowers, dwarf fireweed, signs of mountain goats and wolves, and eventually the turning point is the front door to the ice field.

The return hike, yellow flowers, sun in our eyes, side hilling to save our tired legs, I can see home far below by the water, ravens follow us, it's perfect.

And then, we're there again.

The down climb is, yes, just as bad. We stop, collect ourselves, mentally prepare. Slowly, safely, not exactly trusting the rope but letting it guide us down. I sigh when we're all safely to the ridge below, the scariest, and best, behind us.

What's the worst that could happen?

You fall, get hurt, really hurt, or you don't and then you get to see it all.

When weights are outlawed,

Only laws will be outweighed

Only outs will weigh in

When there are weighs to a means

Where's there's a way

There's a means

Cause and effect are overrated

Cause is overstated

Effect is unaffected

If you can't get there from here, stay

If they can't get here from there, wait for them

Demographics equilibrate and entropy wins

When the going gets shitty

The shitty get going

Good riddance

Unreasonable people

Have no reason to people

Reasonable worlds

Fortunate people

With fortunes, unfortunately

Forthrightly command unreasonably

When the reasonable disagree with you

And the unreasonable agree with you

Maybe the reason is you

If you can dream it

You can do it

Avoid the nightmares

When life gives you lemons

Reach for the sublimes

Spit out the seeds

If discomfort gives you comfort

Like nipple rings and gimp balls

Find comfort in unemployment

If you can't win for losing

Nor lose all your winnings

Consider the dice

If going the distance

Means others pass you by

Your mileage may vary

If you can call a kettle black

And see the forest for the trees

Open your eyes

If your crime doesn't pay

Try mine for a day

It does

Relatives are commutative

When all things being equal

Tilts the world against you

No-thing new was ever undisturbed

wringing from the sole to soul

the cold cradle rocking,

the papers say it's hard to let go...

of the hysterical,

known and unknown.

Comfort/Disturb me challenge @RosemarieThorn

The poet in the snow,

freezing and observing,

Stealing glances at his tanned skin and

Burnt brown hair,

His dry, cracked knuckles that would be

Bloodied if he was allowed to keep them that way.

The poet in the ice,

Cold, confused, and quaint.

A violent gust almost sweeps her off her feet.

The poet in the sleet,

Silently sobbing,

Shuddering, blubbering,

Breaking.

Art becomes whatever the mind thinks imagines creates with purposeful intent; something useful made from anything I'd say as it bewildered the eyes in recent years: art was crafted out of trash, once abandoned regained usefulness, all eyes mine too fixated on that point. Sometimes something considered as "just... simple art" like a fire can reignite the once burned out flames of passion in others' hearts.

To think that something important or even more-so someone could one day be regarded as useless futile just merely existing and blowing as a leaf carried in the wind - lies, that should be cast away never to see the light of day ever again.

A One Sentence Story:

As she and he whistled

They'd not realized;

It thought they where communicating.

something about it was comforting, the way the misshapen face

seemed to smile in solidarity at our shared plight:

the battle of the deformed, although my fallacies were less visible.

the eyes bulged, in tandem with my envy––

eyes always seeking out reasons to be less than another.

or perhaps it was the cracks in the lips, dried out

like my own, craving the saliva of another to soothe me

and yet unable to find the time to cultivate such intimacy.

perhaps it was the shriveled ears, only hearing what i

allowed myself to hear; the opinions of like-minded individuals

making themselves known in the echo chamber of my mind

because i cannot stand to be wrong, but even more so

i am tired of people insisting i am wrong simply for existing.

maybe it was the fingers, crooked with age, a symbol

of my greatest fear: that one day my body will bow

under the weight of my mind, and i will no longer be able

to do what i love: writing, my fingers pressing down on keyboard keys

or scrawling in notebooks with the fragile tip of a pencil

that breaks if i put too much pressure on its tip.

more still, it could have been the gaping maw of crooked teeth,

sunk deep into rose-tinted gums, those enunciators of words

that come out all wrong and cut themselves on the edges of my molars

they bleed when i speak them aloud.

i watch the painting, entranced by the way it reflects me as easily as a mirror.

i grimace to see if the painting changes alongside me,

stick out my tongue and pull on my cheeks to see if it opens its mouth,

to see if its throat is just as distorted as mine, twins in our suffering.

a family walks past with their children, the mothers huffs––

"they really shouldn't show such disturbing things in here.

think of the poor children who'd have nightmares looking at that thing."

her daughter points at the painting and giggles,

"look mommy, that man has a silly face."

i couldn't tell if she was talking about me or the painting.