Poetry

All life is poetry. But not all poetry is beautiful. Some of it is structured, following a specific rhythm with so many syllables and every other line rhyming together like something God sent down for nothing more than to sound alike and pretty.

My poetry is freestyle. There is little rhyme, the rhythm goes on and on...

And the thought occurs to me: one of the most important things about poetry is how others read it and what - if - they understand. Someone stumbling over the words and missing the rhymes can make your life seem nothing. A deadpan voice makes you turn around and say..."Somehow, I thought there was more."

All the imagery in the world can't make your poetry meaningful if you're in a world that doesn't want to listen. Whether you write about daytime, nighttime, love or loss, all is for naught if not one person will pick up the page and begin to read.

Once I wrote a poem to the "readers of my life" and at that point I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for. It seemed pretentious in my fourteen-year-old mind to be asking others to pay attention, take note of what I say and do and apply it to your life. At nineteen, it still seems pretentious...though not nearly as much. Now I've done things that make the lines more lyrical.

Poetry is a great analogy for life. Unfortunately, not all sonnets can be happy and elegies will never go away. My poetry is sad...art reflecting life reflecting art. It's all a circle.

What reason have I to be sad, people ask. I'm successful, ambitious, I have opportunity. They don't see the anger hiding in that last couplet, the days I sit there and wish I could disappear. They don't see the addictions. They can't understand them, because I don't understand them myself. The addictions don't hurt the body, but they hurt the soul. Hell...the poetry is an addiction. It's appropriate, then, that I should talk about it here.