they say you tend to create art in times of pain,
times of shame,
when you flick the light switch and forget the bulb has been dead and you can't reach high enough to change it.
when you call the one who runs laps around your mind, and those empty dial tones feel like the steady waiting in your life, wondering who, if anyone, will pick up the phone.
when you hold the pen up to the paper and forget the words to the emotions oozing out of your being, and paper was your last resort, in hopes someone would listen.
these moments tend to become reaccuring, repetitive, circulating though blood and marrow in my body, becoming a force made to stop time,
hoping I'll look back and understand why every puzzle piece is shaped the way it is, and I'll be the one picking up the phone

life had become a yellow-pages phone-book, a directory of names and numbers i'll never need but still keep around,
flipping through pages in hopes of finding what i was searching for, but finding the unknown places i never knew existed, like "Cartridge World" and "Indian Kitchen"
and the numbers that used to mean so much to find, mean nothing in no time, and i'm left with millions of area-codes and combinations of numbers that become encryptions, like the people i couldn't seem to figure out, or the ones that hung up the phone without saying goodbye,
life sounded like the leafing through pages and dialing numbers, the phone-lines and the voicemails, waiting for people to pick up the phone, and leaving messages in hopes of a call back, and listening to voices that radiate warmth one moment but turn cold the next, fearing every single dial will be a wrong number, and i'll never get connected to the right call.

after flipping through 10 digit sequences and never finding the right call,
insecurities rose as frequent as the sunrise,
and i created a wall with murals on one side, and brick on the other,
making sure whoever rang me would only hear the voice of a simple cold "hello",
i did not want to pick up the phone and create fires for people who were going to water me down,
expose my murals and let spectators decline and walk away,
i'd rather know they saw nothing and left because they never witnessed the real version of me, only taking in brick walls, hearing dials instead of voices, ears listening to the robotic sound of answering machines and not the melodies from within me, staying awake only to watch the sunset, but be gone before the sunrise.
it was frightening to think some drifted away after eyes peeled from brick, saw murals, took in melodies, read words painted down endless roads of feeling, stayed for the sunrise, and picked up the phone to find me on the other side,
the shaking feeling resonated inside, the wondering that would never end, are pieces of me missing, or were there too many?