Is Creative Energy Finite? or a Bottomless Well?

I've been crazy busy lately with our company's move and some major projects at work. Then there's ongoing renovations at the old crack house I live in, and never enough time or energy it seems.

I'm guilty of trying to compartimentalize everything, and keep work, home, personal life, poetry, creativity in nice neat little manageable areas of my life. I also fall in the trap of thinking I'm constantly low, always starving for this sort of mythical mana of personal creative energy. Thinking that for some reason I only have enough to just focus on work, or just writing, or just personal life, etc.

However, it seems that the more I go down that path the less energy there is, the unhappier I am, the more unfufilled I am.

So there's this constant effort to remind myself that creativity and life energy is one of those rare items that the more you use the more you have.


Conservation of Energy

Divvied up, horded
In some inner fortress,
Behind locked doors,
Under heavy guard.
Energy razored out in neat
Cocaine lines,
On giant mirrors --
I dare not look into.

So precious as to be
Rendered useless,
So often counted
The edges worn.
One stack for work,
One to feed the meters,
A small dusty cache
For dreams delayed.

What once seemed so
Boundless in my youth,
Now seeming so finite
Demanding stingy parcels.
Denying the truth of
The creative universe
The one true
Perpetual Motion Machine.