Poetry Is This (f**k your sonnet)

A Poem by Melissa Ridge

Praise to the sweet child who can describe a flower in 14 lines in Iambic pentameter

She has precisely 10 syllables per line in each quatrain and she stresses the right words right

Well here I sit, stuck with what is left
Here I sit with my run off babbling non-structured, slurred broken mess
Here I sit with this life playing in front of my eyes and she says that what I see is not suitable for the classroom

Limitations
Concentrations on the formations of all the words on the page without reading what the words actually tell you
Stories, ignored, to be examined to see not whether what colour the poet’s ink bled, or how many scars mar this page
Stories, which should be told
Are. Unnecessary.

How can poetry breathe
Without this human experience?
How can poetry be
Without something meaningful?

We, breathe life into art
This, cold window we look through every day becomes covered by the warm condensation of each artists’ breath so that they can draw symbols, lace words and breathe, art.

How can we succeed when we limit ourselves to the sensitivity
Simplicity of others?

Whose souls have not seen light or felt darkness
Have not entwined with another and been torn apart to have grown again
To have failed and cut down and destroyed and risen again

Poetry is not straight lines
Chopped pieces of wood to build a house

It is the wild bark of the trees that build a forest.
It is the rain, the sun, the moon, the snow, the wind, the hail, the dirt, the trees, the life that moves around us that doesn’t belong in a limited spectrum of “mindful to the classroom”.

Sweet peach that will bruise and ache and bleed and feel at the motion of the razor across skin, the miss of a fist, the teeth swallowed, cries wallowed, the voice in the streets, the murders, the lies, the unforgivable travesties that fill our lives.

Life is cruel, cut-throat, callous and malicious
Art is the crutch, the cane, the relief from the pain
Poetry is learning to walk again; breathe again
Poetry is brave and dangerous, lost, found, disserted and discovered, loud and wrong, graphic and insensitive.

To the woman who told me that poetry should be PG, locked in the confinement of the classroom, to be careful what you say and not be graphic or insensitive.

Poetry is free
Poetry is alive
Poetry is this.