I think it was the free form that caught my eye.Yes, that's what it was.I had never liked writing in the structured way,I liked having spaces,Run-on sentences,And stops in paragraphs that would only make senseIf I were writing a poem.Shel Silverstein I discovered at the tender age of six,Still learning to read bigger words,Bigger sentences,Where the Sidewalk Ends had me hooked. I always loved using one-word expressions;Happy.Sad.Me.There just such a satisfying sense of finality about them.Much later, an ex-friend introduced me to Michael Faudet,I read some of his tamer works.Then I went a little deeper, did a bit more reading, andOh God.That wasn't appropriate for me.I haven't looked at any of his poems since. Above my desk used to be a collage of comics.My grandmother would always save them,And the Sunday comics would be my sister’s or mine.The ones that I liked would get taped up:Pearls Before Swine, Garfield, Get Fuzzy, Pickles.It was only when they started falling down,When the tape started to wear,That I put something new up.Poems.Robert Frost crossed my path soon after,And I was enameled with his“Stopping by Woods on a Frosty Evening”.One line in that poem,“I've got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep,”I thought was writing genius.I thought was magic.I still do. That poem was one of the first that I wrote down, I wrote it down on one of those big Post-It Notes,You know?Those went where the comics used to be.Then I started writing some of my own,Ones about love,Disappointment,Loss.They feel extremely teen angsty now.I had heard about Lang Leav,I decided to read some of her writing.Let's just say that there are many of her poems on Post-It's. The thing about poetry is that It's my form of expression,My way of writing,My stress reliever,And the biggest source of my quiet pride.There seem to be quite a lot of Post-It poemsAbove my desk now.