I did not grow up with poetry.
I grew up with music.
Yet, to me, the former is no different from the latter.

Toes waving in the pool of words beneath me.

Skin caressed by the mist of notes that envelop me.

Jagged black walls coated with water reflect the sunlight at odd angles.

The notes flow from atop a high cliff.

The wall of water that pummels the black rocks beneath my feet, the song that flows onto my blank white pages, is nothing but the collection of notes, sounds, and occasionally childhood memories.

The notes that crash down before me splay themselves out into the expanse of blackness that is this cave, and transform into words, phrases, paragraphs and settle down, calmly shifting about the bottom of this cave.

If I sit on this rocky ledge, and let my toes touch the sacred pool and let the roots of my heart drink the words in.

If, instead of seeing things through the clarity of my eyes, I gaze through the broken, distorted wall of liquid notes that cascades down from above the jagged black rocks…

Everything becomes much clearer.

And the cave I sit inside of tonight and every night…

Isn’t very dark at all anymore.

I wrote this poem because the notes of a song are the window that I see life through. Music has taught me to not believe in what you see, but to believe in what you feel, to believe in the way your heart moves. As to why I write, I write simply because it’s the way my brain works, the way my heart moves. Music is what I feel, poetry is how I make sense of what I feel, poetry is how I explain to myself what I’m feeling, the way that my heart is moving. I wrote this poem listening to a song, I always have, and I always will. In short, poetry is not just self-empowering for me; the poetry I write is me.