My Life in Pants: Those Creative Few – Of Critics, Creators, and What Remains (Poem)

Those who create, create. Those who critique, destroy.

Those Creative Few

The creative mind is more often than not,
Assailed by those who have not the mind to even try,
And by those who have tried, but failed.

Critics criticize both major and minor,
Professionally or personally, or both.
They themselves do not uniquely create;
They disembowel and pick bones clean,
Spilling the blood and tearing out the sinew,
Discounting, disregarding, and dismissing the soul within.

Devoid of originality, bereft of concept and creativity,
Flawed and pedestrian, themselves ignorant of it,
They require and demand flawless postulation,
And seamless construction of a standardized derivation...
Of something that is in itself a non-derivative work of genius...
And of individuality.

An impossible perfection no one can define, yet everyone demands.

Those who can create, create.
Those who cannot create, destroy.
Yet, that destruction is a creation too,
Of nicely turned words, polite phrases,
Colorful and engaging,
Soliloquies, both light and heavy handed,
Written or spoken, or both.

Opinions offered up to all by a less creative mind,
By those who cannot understand that subtle or gross imperfection is art.
It is birth.
It is Life.
It is soul.
It is real.

And it is Truth.

It is the artist, the poet, the writer, and the sculptor,
And all those who create that which is tangible and intangible,
Creation that touches and moves the heart and soul and mind of a few of the many,
Or even a single one of the multitudes;

Yes—even a single one, forever moved, is enough.
For in that stirred heart,
The creator lives on—
As a name, as a title, as a stanza that time remembers.

The reviewer, evaluator, analyst, judge, family authority, and critic,
Those self-obsessed dismissive connoisseurs of other people's talents and art,
Their words and works and opinions fade quickly, lost or bargain-binned, discounted.
What they once dismissed, they quietly entombed—
The artist's work, reduced to records, unconsidered, and institutionalized.
Forgotten, or set into archives that no one will ever access, or discover,
Often skimmed past on an index card;

Critics are never remembered,
But the creative and creations, the very few, they endure.
Beyond the critics, modern or in generations to come,
Always and in all times, criticized and analyzed,

Still, they endure.

Immortal... for as long as they can be.

Those Creative Few.