What Poetry Has Taught Me
It taught me to write
It taught me to read
It taught me to want
It taught me to need
It taught me to rhyme
It taught me to see
It taught me to help
It taught me to be
It taught me to write out emotions
when I could only speak in similes
It taught me to read through the lines
like Mozart with symphonies
It taught me want when my heart filled with the envy
It taught me to need when words bleed out my pen-speak
It taught me to rhyme with words so absurd that when I traversed
through the stanzas that I versed into verses to verse
the thoughts I was thinking when I went off on tangents
without planning an ending, it brought it all back together
through lines that I write in due time and I find that this climb
on the vine of this life that’s like morning to night; is semicolons to a splice,
is pumpkins to spice, is the rats to the mice is the balance dark to the light,
is the point to the knife, and is an expression of my
thoughts.
It taught me to see my way back on track when I focused on rhyming
instead of the lines and instead of the point of what poetry taught me
It taught me to help my friends when I empathized with their pain
and put myself in their shoes to experience their heartbreak
It helped me to be the person I knew I could be and that person
is the person who understands what poetry taught me.
It taught me to write when I wrote it
It taught me to read when I noticed
It taught me to want what I needed
It taught me to need what I needed
It taught me to rhyme when I could
It taught me to see what I should
It taught me to help who I can
It taught me to be who I am