Must a critic be themselves criticized in order to be respected?

Poetry is like a drawing. You can spend hours making it perfect, like a photograph.
There are people who do this. Realists.
I’m a realist.

Poems can be like abstract art too. All fucked up and random. Words and images splashed on the page in hopes that the readers/listeners minds will find a pattern.
We’re good at that.

Throw out enough words and a person can’t help but find meaning.
I’ve fallen for it.

Some abstracts capture a little bit of something real.
You look at it and you can’t quite see it. Maybe you can feel it.
Maybe it comes to you when you look away.

What if I were to tell you that everything is the same? And everything is in everything?
What if told you in reading these lines backwards you’d find the meaning of life?
Would that scare or excite you?

Would you sit in denial of such simplicity? Would you demand a greater challenge?
Would you see everything crumble or everything come together?
Would you see both?

Why don’t old people burn themselves in front of the White House in protest to war?
Why don’t their dieing breaths shout protest – wield the power of their dwindling lives?
Do they condone the existence they will soon depart?

Do they realize a greater meaning beyond war, hate, death, and pain, or do they accept them?
If I am who I am because of the world that has created me – am I not the world?
Why do we so often ask questions after and not before?

If I am everything, then I too am like a drawing. Perhaps I’m painted by a realist.
Perhaps I’m just a reproduction of what my artist has seen, and touched.
A duplication. Or an amalgamation.

Or perhaps I’m a piece of abstract art. All fucked up and random. Just a splash.
Maybe I just think I’m something. Forcing patterns out of nothing.
Maybe I’ve fallen for it again.

Or maybe I’m something between. Maybe I’m that little bit of truth in the abstract.
I can feel it, and I tense up, I look harder. What if I let my eyes loose focus?
Will I see me?

Perhaps it is easier to see truth in that which does not strive so hard to reproduce it. Can truth be in deeper disguise within a fact, then in a lie?