To describe why I love to write is fairly similar to describing why people love to drive. When you to turn the key in the ignition, you access a power, a raw energy that you can shape and guide and ride and feel. If knowledge is power, then words are the vehicle through which you can harness and shape and guide that power and turn it into something beautiful.

Poetry was my first car. I polished it and loved it and gave my parents the privilege of reading it. They probably thought it looked more like a trainwreck. As with a first car, I had to explain to them what it meant to me, and even if its wheels needed a little more grease, why it was beautiful.

Then I got to middle school, and after that, high school. I had to write so much for classes, for teachers. I learned three different essay formats every year, two new methods of analytical writing, and if that wasn’t enough, I was in Journalism. I did so much writing for others that I forgot to write for myself. I still loved to write, but my poetry-riding days were over for a while. I parked it in the garage and let it collect dust.

As I continued to write, I found poetry in my writing. It didn’t have rhyme and meter, but it had feeling. It had beauty. It had power. I learned to channel that power into all of my writing, not just poetry. I sang. I wrote opinion pieces about the things I was passionate about. I used words to get through to the people I cared about. Perhaps I’d abandoned trochee and tetrameter, but I’d found the soul.

My soul; poetry. And that’s why I write.