The Artist's Mind Poem by David Welch

An artist's mind is a strange thing,
whether they write or sing or paint,
it convinces such people that every task
they set their talents to will be great.
We all know most of it will not,
it'll fall short and then fade away,
but those one or two moments of the sublime…
we all live for those rarest of days.

It's probably best that we do this
cause our minds are running at all hours,
with nothing to create we would turn loose
on the world our imaginative powers.
This may not seem like a great danger,
we rarely look all that threatening,
but I remember a frustrated Austrian painter
whose fertile mind did unspeakable things...

And some folk will call us arrogant
for thinking the world needs our craft.
They're right, we are a pretentious bunch,
but there's much more to it than that.
They say being lawyers or engineers
would bring more money, and less heart-ache,
that's true enough, but they fail to realize:
if we did not create, we would break.

You see every moment, the ideas, they grow,
pressing harder deep within our minds,
like a tumor, taking up more and more,
until another thought is quite hard to find.
The ideas run circuits, again and again,
pressing forwards like a runaway train.
The only was to ever really be free of it
is to rip that idea from your brain.

And even then it's a fleeting reprieve,
a few days, maybe a week or two,
then something new emerges, a little idea
that grows quickly, until it consumes…
In truth the artist has little choice,
forever doomed by their imaginations,
we're all mad men in permanent decline,
the only treatment that works? Creation.