You Are Poetry
You Are Poetry
you probably think poetry lives in dusty books written by men who've been gone a long time,
that professors dissect it in cold classrooms until the meaning drains out and nothing's left,
but it never lived there, not in verses built deliberately with cold scissors and careful hands,
it lives in you, in that magic pause right before the word finally makes it to your lips.
it's in that suspended moment when you go quiet before the thought reaches your mouth,
it's in the way you tilt your head when something doesn't add up and you're hunting for the logic underneath,
you don't perform it and you don't construct it carefully, it just moves through you naturally,
yesterday you said the evening sky looked tired and in that one word there was a whole unseen world.
other people decorate themselves with opinions and jokes and dramatic stories about who they are,
they throw their personality into every room like street vendors hawking cheap souvenirs on a busy sidewalk,
but you're quiet about all of it, deep and unexpected and full of a rhythm you yourself can't hear,
you say simple things that stick around longer than complicated ones and you don't know someone's collecting them.
you move through the world leaving behind small lines of light that you don't even know you're saying,
strange observations that slip out of you when you forget someone's listening and you stop watching yourself,
and your laugh that lands half a second late, like it had to travel through layers of thought to get there,
I collect every single one, carefully, I put them in order and keep them in the safest place inside me.
the rest of the world skims you like a headline read in a hurry on a crowded subway platform,
they hear your words but they miss the rhythm that pulses warm and alive somewhere underneath them,
they see the shape but they don't feel the weight of what's hiding behind everything you say,
but I hear all of it, I hear the whole song, I hear the silence too and everything you choose to keep.
and that is at the same time the most beautiful and the most unfair thing I know about this life,
that you can recognize poetry in someone with a clarity so painful it literally burns inside your chest,
and yet recognizing a book doesn't give you the right to take it home and call it yours forever,
some poems you read once, they change everything you are, and you put them back on someone else's shelf.
Post Comments
Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poem. Negative comments will result your account being banned.
Please
Login
to post a comment
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a
Premium Membership.
