With thanks to Macklemore

“Can’t you take some of the knowledge you have and like, convert it into the knowledge that your sister has?”

Little did I know that those words would ring in my ear for at least
A year after they had been spoken. My Grandfather, raised on numbers
And brick-laying, probably didn’t really know what he was saying when
He told me be more like my sister. Because what he was really telling
Me to do was ignore the voice in my head that tells me to write; to
Ignore the metaphors that keep me awake at night and the similes,
That I’m always trying to complicate. What he was really telling me to
Do was go against the grain of my brain, disregard the years I had spent
Reading books and absorbing techniques and swap it for a future in
Numbers, which would be bleak, but admittedly more fiscal. What
My Grandfather really wanted was for me to make a career, rather
Than spend my best years writing poetry that the majority of the world
Will never hear, and the few the do, probably won’t even like. He didn’t
Want me to waste a life. But…

“A life lived for art is never a life wasted.”