I Am Poetry

I Am Poetry.

The round and the fat letters, the ones tall and proud.
The vowels, without whom my words, wise, wily, willful
Woeful, witty and whimsical,
Wouldn’t exist.

My words placed together, equidistance apart, each a part
Of a larger phrase, larger stanza, larger sentence.
Each a slim slice of a grand pie.

You see,
I Am Poetry.

The young poems, pimple faced and confused,
Underdeveloped females graduating high school.
Jeans so tight they may cause disease, but so eager to please she wears them anyway.
Immature males entering the ninth grade, angry because they’re angry and angry because of that too, who’s parents expect them to think only of high school.

The ugly poems, told by portly people; ashamed and spit upon by the beautiful.
Twenty five pounds to go and another failed diet attempt flies in the face of this
Bally’s and Crunch and NYSC infested contempt for unshapely figures.

The ugly poems, big mouths with small minds,
The powerfully stupid.
Thinly veiled illiterate idiots in charge of my, your, and our future.

I Am Poetry.

The beautiful, simple poems,
You know, the birds and the bees, and the green leaves in the trees,
Simply swaying in the cool spring breeze, appeased and quite pleased.
I am Dr. Suess’s Green Eggs broken on Shel Silverstein’s Sidewalk, because

I Am Poetry.

I’m the ultra-concentrated strength of haiku, a simple droplet of which, like soap can fill my sink with bubbles.
I am iambic pentameter, a sonnet, and villanelle, and politically imprisoned nouns and verbs and taboo vocabulary.
I am the fun students have saying assonance, diction, and epistolary.

I Am Poetry.

The fluidity and the rhythm of thoughts rushing river fast and the cacophonic crashes of word waves in collision. 50 Cent performing Jazz, Eminem dancing a jig.
I am conflict and conceit, cooperation and collusion.
I am playing poker. Nikki Giovanni and Nikki Grimes both hold a pair of aces, Sonia Sanchez and June Jordan stare angrily side by side, while Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou quietly survey the situation.
I am Morpheus telling Neo he only offers the truth, and I am Neo popping the red pill.

I Am Poetry,

And I’ll flip these words to suit me.

I Am Poetry
I Am Poetry
I Am Poetry

Am Poetry
Am Poetry

Poetry

Words, vowels, ugly, beauty, Haiku, Shel, 50, sonnet, iambic, assonance, diction, epistolary.

I Am Poetry.