What is a poem?

What do you expect when I step up to a mic?

What is a poem?

A poem is a living entity.

A poem is inspiration.

Inspiration means to breathe, to give life.

A poem lives, breathes and gives life to revolutions, to dreams, to ideas, to new poems.

 

We are all individual poems.

We are God’s workmanship,

The word workmanship means poem.

So, we are all poems crafted by God.

Lines and verses, intersecting and interacting to create the symphony of life.

 

A poem is the beauty in the sound of a heart beat

And in the way our brains take in information, and then store it way in a file cabinet of life memories.

It’s the blank slate created at conception,

Waiting for two people to write on its life,

Wanting nothing more than to live and to learn, internalizing everything to become a person that will change the world.

It’s the son who is the spitting image of his father,

A father, who is trying to live up the image of his.

 

A poem is vulnerable,

Like standing in the mirror naked

And staying there until you learn to love every part of the person looking back at you.

It’s writing words on a page,

And discovering your identity through the dictation you took from divine inspiration.

 

A poem is the 14 carats that sit in every awkward silence.

It is the translation of canvas and paint into paper and words.

The self-expression the forges external connections.

It’s the love found in your mother’s arms,

And the knowledge that no matter where you are or how old you are,

In her arms, you are home.

 

A poem is language in its purist form.

It’s rebellion, a rejection of literary norms.

A poem is long or short,

A poem rhymes or it doesn’t.

A poem is lines and stanzas.

A poem is a heart cut open and poured out for all to see.

A poem is more than lines on a page,

It’s life, it’s breath, its workmanship.

A poem is the good, the bad, and the ugly but finding the beauty in it all.