I was 8 years old the first time I decided that I liked when my words had a little bit of rhyme

But when I was 8 years old I also really liked dinosaurs

 

So I stood in front my second grade class

And I read the lines about “pterodactyls flying

Saying their goodbye-ings” and

“T-rexes leaving X-es for pirates to find” with

“Bugs laying softly behind.”

And that day my teacher cried.

She said, never stop writing because

You’re going to find

That these words that you write,

They’ll keep you in your right mind .

 

And from that day forward, I never stopped.

Although eventually my topics shifted

From fossil finding to

Finding the best internal rhyme

To illustrate what not being able to get out of bed felt like

 

But I mean I guess that was expected

Life could not be all dinosaur bones and bugs

Time passed on and I had to find out that young boys aren’t very nice

But they also just weren’t really what I liked

So I wrote love poems

 

And slowly him turned to her

A little bit before the world was quite ready

But my fingertips weren’t going to stop

Writing what I needed to write

Saying silently what I knew was right

Poems became my anthems of truth

Of love

So I guess that makes me a poet