The first time I wrote a poem

I was in third grade

Down the side of my page I wrote the word May

M

A

Y

May flowers bloom

Always sunny skies

You can smell the buds on the trees

 

That was the first poem I ever wrote,

Since then poetry has changed a lot for me

It's been an outlet

For anger, sadness, loneliness

A go to comforter.

 

My first poem, I wrote at school

With a teacher standing over my shoulder

Telling me which lines should have so many syllables

And which words should rhyme

I cut out a flower from construction paper

And glued it to my poem

I handed it to my teacher

To grade,

So she could tell me if I did a good enough job.

 

The restrictions set by the class were beginning to take a toll on me

My words clogged my arteries

They had nowhere else to go

I feared for a stroke

I was only in third grade

But I knew that this wasn’t the way that poetry was supposed to work.

 

The first time I wrote a poem for myself

I was in eighth grade

I wrote a ballad for my tire swing

How I hoped to touch the sky one day

I spent that year lost in a world of poetic diction

An ode for everyone and everything

That ever made a difference,

Life was either wonderful

Or the worst thing that ever happened to me

In poetry there is no in between

 

The freedom of free verse was more than one person could handle

I spoke poems

Heard poems

Saw poems in everything

I ate poems for breakfast

And brushed my teeth with them before bed

After years of searching

I thought I had found something worth waking up for

After years of pretending

I thought I had finally found myself.

 

The first time I gave up on poetry

I was in ninth grade

My English teacher told me there was no time

For creativity

 

We analyzed and synthesized

We read books older than my Grandfather - classics

We learned the difference between wanton and Wonton

I tried to write my poetry

But after homework and essays and a job

All I wanted to do was sleep,

 

AP and honors took up all of my life

There was no time for poems

Teachers and counselors decided

My future would benefit if I started college, the same day I started high school

Because education is everything

But what is the point of education

When it goes no farther than the school walls?

 

The first time I gave up on poetry

Was the first time I gave up on myself,

I stopped listening to my heart

And only listened to the people around me

Convinced that life is a competition

I did everything I could to get to the top

I stopped caring about what mattered to me

And only about what mattered to others

I watched my friends and classmates to the same

The stress of life was quickly pooling up around me

A flood, I could not stop

The waters pushed against me until finally

I broke.

 

Now I write poetry in my bedroom

By the light of a single lamp

Late at night when my brain is running in personified circles

Coming up with hyperbolic metaphors

To captivate an abstract audience

That resides only in the labyrinth of my mind.

 

Poetry, has become more than a way to write

It's become a way to think

To look at life

Poetry,

Speaks through lines of rhyme

Through words with double meanings

Similes that are so cliche I want to cry.

 

Sometimes the words stop coming

And you write for hours and hours

And you come up with nothing

They call that writers block

But I like to call it a poetry drought

Because when I write it rains

Hyperboles fall from the sky

Like lonely similes that drip from the leaves

Of symbolic tress

That grow from metaphoric dirt

Lightning cracks, shooting creativity through my veins

I overflow on words

My brain feels like it might explode

If I don't write faster - get them out,

 

I can't stop the flow that comes from with in

Once it starts it’s not going to stop anytime soon

Winding a river through me and out onto the page

Where the words arrange themselves into patterns

That even sometimes I don't understand

But that's not the point

Of Poetry,

 

It doesn't always make the most sense

The closest writing that will ever come to life

The most abstract

Unique styles are the ones we like best

The cubism of literature

When I write I draw a masterpiece with my words

My pen guides them into place

But nothing more

It's my heart that tells them what to mean.

 

The first time I wrote a poem

I was in third grade

Down the side of my page I wrote the word

May

M

A

Y

May flowers bloom

Always sunny skies

You can smell the buds on the trees.