Sense of Self
Sweet soft rhymes rhythmic against ears so eager
Eat every word with sweet salivating stealth
Poems provoke pieces of me
Hanging on the quatrain I quiver through questions of who I am
But in each alliteration I arise
and am emphasized at the edge of a
river, my feet dipping in the free verse
the rest are refrains, they repeat, they continue
Each evening they ask for an elegy
Wanting me to waver against what winds the world sends.
Slowly I turned each simile into a smile and I say
I am not hiding behind a haiku,
I am an epic.
I am eternal.
I too will be eaten by english teachers for
eons after I am turned to ashes
and precisely this way the poetry taught me to love myself.