Life is not a poem.

Any irony,

foreshadowing,

or rhyme scheme is accidental.

You can’t read out my life

in neat little stanzas

and peal back the meanings

one by one.

You can’t glide across its surface as,

word by word,

it falls off your tongue.

You can’t open up to a specific chapter of

someone’s life,

point at a line, and say:

“Yes.

See, here

is when you first meet

Sally Anne:

that little whore.

You don’t know until chapter three

that her character is really

a personification of

society’s standards for women

and

the hopeless struggle they take to

overcome it”

because life is not literature.

There is no hidden meanings

Behind the everyday struggles of men

And women and children.

It just is.

And its broken.

And its our job to fix it.

 

Because

life is not a poem,

a novel,

a short story,

a passage from

some long lost prose

that all of society,

except literature teacher’s bookshelves,

have forgotten.

And though it’s true that poems

and books

and words formed together to express any ideas

are trying to signify aspects of life,

this mirror image does

not reflect back.

Ralph Ellison may have captured

the invisible identity of one whom is unknown,

but

the true invisible man

that walks these streets

is not formed across the pages of

white paper with black ink.

Books only travel as far as

the reader’s empathy

allows,

fore life is not a poem.

 

Even if sometimes we

Wish

It could be.

 

So, don’t call me

Fucking Juliet.

I am not some character in the

Grand sceame of things.

I’ll be who I want to be.

I hope my story is not just a tragedy formed

because one teenage boy

couldn’t stop

long enough to form a thought

outside of

his penis.

And if my life is such a catastrophe,

It will not be written is such wondrous

Pentameter or sonnets

As Shakespeare’s himself.

But thank God it won’t be taught as a love story

To some poor ninth graders

Whose teachers just don’t seem to understand.

 

Sometimes I’m glad

life is not a poem.

It is not as neat

or meaningful

or sad

or joyful

or fulfilling.

But it is my own.

And it is your own.

And it is all of our own.

 

So don’t call me fucking Juliet.