Poetry

A freestyle poem about the way I feel about poetry and its definitions in my mind.

 Poetry is the sound you hear when you’re drifting to sleep at night

A bright light at the end of a dark tunnel

The way your fingers graze across the skin of a lover

Poetry is that book you were going to write but never got around to

It’s the idea that something can be started but never finished

And vice versa

Poetry is the light dancing in the eyes of an artist when the room is black

It’s the blackness in the room

And the baited breaths held by everyone there until the lights come back on

Poetry is the sun setting only to rise again

It’s the ending to every love song you’ve ever heard

And the beginning to every love story you ever dreamed about

Poetry is the rain falling and you getting caught in it

You’re in the middle of the ocean and a storm is coming

You’re helpless, but you’re brave

Poetry is floating down a river

And wondering why it chose to move that way

And the soft reflections of your skin on the water as you just go with it

Poetry is breaking a rule and using a new one, or not using any rules at all. It’s stepping out of the norm back into the norm with a new flow, a new grace, a new power. It’s every word you ever imagined saying and every word that ever got stuck right on the tip of your tongue. Poetry is not always measured in lines or verses, no, poetry can be measured in heartbeats, in the number of times your tongue flicked across your teeth, in the number of breaths you shared with any given person on any given day in any given place.

Poetry is the paragraph you didn’t read so much as feel

The break in your sentence where the ‘I love you’ was supposed to go

The gut-wrenching pain that is losing everything

Poetry is that little twitch you get in your eye when you’re angry

That feeling you get when you mess everything up

And every word your mother used to say to you when you had done something wrong

Poetry is grace and the lack of it

Harsh realities and tender fantasies

A vintage photograph against a night sky

Poetry is that city that you love so much

The breath you catch when you see the skyline

The beating of your heart as you return to the place your soul calls home

Poetry is everything and nothing

It can make my world turn and your world stop

And then remind you that our worlds are the same

Poetry is writing a poem about poetry

Late at night when only the shadows are watching

And titling it ‘The Woes of Dreaming’, even though that has nothing to do with the poem

Poetry is taking every second, every minute, every hour

Rewinding it

And then using it to define poetry.