Poetry is a pack sack of invisible keepsakes.

     – Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

    – William Wordsworth

Poetry is eternal graffiti written  on the heart of everyone.

    – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

    – Robert Frost

It has always seemed slightly preposterous to me that I am given but one designated month in which I am meant to appreciate poetry for there is not a single moment that I do not depend upon its very existence. You see, poetry has done more for me than any human being ever could. This article is beginning at the request of a dear friend. She asks me “What does poetry mean to you?”, which effectively prompts me to pick up a pen, and though a thousand words come to mind, it has taken me a week to put them into order. Now that I have finally found the string of words, I realize that when I put them into a line, it is never ending, constantly evolving, and yet engraved inside my bones. I can not describe what I can not fathom, but I will try to make you understand what it is that poetry means to me.

Poetry to me is an inevitable release. It is a cathartic burden and an incomprehensible blessing. It is a darkened corner and a haunting reverie, a frantic escape and final confrontation. I tell it my secrets and it listens intently, recording but not sharing until I give it permission. Poetry is my psychiatrist and best friend, but also the elephant in the room I am sometimes forced to acknowledge for I can’t hide from the truth after I’ve written it down. It will sit on my bedside table, waiting until I am ready to manage the wrinkles in my life that I’ve already ironed into smooth words of clarity.

I use poetry as a map within the labyrinth of my emotions and then again as a tissue when they become too much. I use poetry as a shade tree when I need to rest, and even as a stallion when I am ready to take the reins.

Poetry builds walls around my heart when it needs protection and knocks them down when it sees fit. It is a vault inside a meadow and a long forgotten path. It is a seatbelt and a knife. It is a storm cloud and a contradiction.

In relation to myself, I might call poetry a window, but you might call it a sword. I might call it a mirror, but you might call it a flame.

Poetry is a thousand things at once: A white wall. A circus. An open field. Raw emotion. A sparrow. A galaxy. A warm bath. A tulip tree. An orange peel. A long car ride. A broken heart. A footprint. A bad joke. Devastation. A disguise. A hurricane. A memory. A picture. A bloody tear. Converse. A junk drawer. A broken arrow. And everything except for nothing. It becomes exactly what I need even when I neither know or want it, and it can be that way for you too if you let it- but then again maybe not.

The way I see it is everyone has at least one thing that makes them complete. For van Gogh it was painting. For Beethoven it was music. For peanut butter it is jelly. And for me it is poetry, which expresses for my heart what I otherwise can not explain. It gives me peace and puts my soul at rest, and though sometimes it tells of my destruction, poetry and God have saved my life. I have found my home in poetry, and I don’t plan on moving anytime soon.

I pray that you’ve been able to follow my precocious prose to a place where you may perhaps discover my rare perception of poetry and that should you not find your place beside us poets, you would discover it elsewhere.