Lim Creativity - Ian Jang (Trinity Christian School, Tenth Grade)
Running out of clean water
Running out of purity
Running out of fuels
Running out of passion
Running out of fish
Running out of discovery
Running out of soil
Running out of soul
And now
When does the creativity
Even after countless refills
Inspiration the tubes of fresh paint
On the palette of the human mind
Which is as skilled as
A six year old who finger paints
Compared with the earth’s grandeur
When does it run out too
Because the numbers
Just as easily
Turn against us
Because snowflakes aren’t special
Because according to our own
Statistics
Machinations
Desperate grasping for control
For quantification of the
Unquantifiably beautiful
The chances are never zero
And with mankind’s insistence
On persistence
The limit of the function
Relating collective creativity with time
As time approaches positive infinity
Because we can never go back
Is zero
Because the river runs dry
All possible permutations
All the boxes ticked off
As our numbers turn against us
As we quantify and systematize
And artificially mass produce
Our creativity
When the lack of the fiction
Makes all the stories a reality
And if all these indeed fade
Why do I feel
As if this feeling will not
Because even this is a struggle
To put together the words
In a new and interesting order
More permutations checked off
Mutations so muting
So that this is
“Original”
A word that has no more meaning
We’ve already killed it
And how much more time
Until it has all been wrung
Out
And all that is left is
Desperation
A world where all water is muddy
A world where every heart is soiled
A world with no more lights
A world where hearts beat purposelessly
A world with an empty ocean
A world with nothing more to find
A world without the color green
A world without the concept of growth
And now you are bored
Because I stopped trying
A page ago
Because this is no longer
Poetry
This is a complaint
That it is too difficult to write
The meaning of my submission
Is only to prove that it exists