Poem: A Prodigal Artist.
For a couple of years, I took my focus off writing. I attempted to study business, corporations, marketing. Something, I realized, held me back. The desire was still burning to create, and once I went back through my notes and files, I made a decision to write and market myself again. I intended to read this at a poetry night in San Diego, but I never had the opportunity.
It’s April again. Everything happens in April. My next 20 years of being a writer starts today. Please enjoy this poem.
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“A Prodigal Artist”
by Dan Touchette
February 26, 2006
So here I am, a shape in rare of form, once disappeared but still obsessed.
At many times, I have forgotten and forsaken and repelled such a track, and yet I here return to greet those in proximity.
Dear audience, my lust is still strong.
As ever, but I have been sidetracked by haze and laze and commitment.
I know you all are juniors, those of my era seem waylaid and dissipate, devoted they are to fears of reckless platitudes than cautious regrooming of discovery.
I am a migrant of simple strokes– a vagabond in ink, maybe not as visible as say those dirtied and hopeless, but my machinations are bred by the desire to create,
And to dull that spirit is a dis-spirit, as much as opium challenged the Romantics in their rows.
Truthfully, I have felt dead and dull and disquieted, staring forlornly at phantoms, suppressing an itch.
And why?
Why did I forsake my passions?
Why did I let the coals linger, but to near-extinction?
Those embers that kept me strong in crisis.
That glow that secretly and tenuously held my skin together?
Why indeed?
Because I found comfort in solitaire.
And I closed my ears to kind words and shuffled them off my shoulders like tiny flies.
Because I stopped listening.
Because I grew stale and felt stale.
I let my apathy distract my purpose.
I invite you back like my kin.
Welcome aboard my journey, kind denizens
As I aim to connect and reconnect.
