Poetic Expression

I took some good advice, and went through the history of this blog, saving my poetic indiscretions into a word document. And it got me to thinking...

I've been thinking about pain and poetry. Not really physical pain, so much as mental. How some of the most beautiful thoughts and experiences are beautiful for their exquisite painfulness.

There is beauty in anything that makes people feel. No matter how gorgeous, or ugly, or painful, or wonderful...To evoke and feel real emotion...Is beautiful.

That is why poetry grabs us, like a whisper on the wind it floats through the readers mind, making us feel. Something. Anything.

So often I find poetic ramblings to be an exquisite torture, both as reader and writer. Because the best poetry comes from strong emotion. Whether it's love or pain, poetic expression should leave the reader feeling. Something. Anything. And in that moment, we are reminded that we are alive. Truly alive.

Poetry is not the dull ache of mind-numbing suffering. It is the quick sharp pain delivered by the edge of a knife. It is pain like that of the day of loss, not the simmering river of long since loss. It is sinking into the feeling on a page, humanity in letters.

Poetry is thought without form, feeling without cages, uncensored dreams put to pages. Poetry should make us feel. Something. Anything.

Poetry has no need for reason, or indeed at times, rhyme.

Poetry is the soul on paper. Heartache and joy and passion in the rarely so mutable written word. I have often found the most painful verses to be the most exquisite.

Poetry captures, for a moment, those places between torture and ecstasy. It is the voice of pleasure and pain, capturing that rare place where they become one and the same.

Poetic expression is the history of humanity wrapped up in the ramblings of individual souls, the sound of the mountains in the dreams of man, the voice of hunger and pain, the feeling of rain on one's skin, the glory of love, and the hunger of life...

Like floating on a song, poetry gives us a glimpse of the spirit, an unbridled glance into the human heart, an otherwise unmatched expression of the soul on paper.

Poetry is the voice of hunger and gluttony

the voice of passion and pain

the sound of the soul when it dances in the rain.

Poetry is the blood in our veins

it tells us of our final goodnights

it is the tale of our final goodbyes

the history of humanity's mysteries.

Poetry is love and loss

the story of each man's individual cross

the sound of a newborn babe breathing its first breath

the excruciating beauty found only in loss

Poetry is the voice of the father when he says that he has used up all of his ink

on his way into a never-ending sea

the final line in his own story.

Poetry is the way moonbeams fall across your pillow in the silence of night

the sound of a child's cry

that feeling we have when something we loves goes on to die

the illumination of sunlight on the morning dew.

Poetry is the feeling of skin underneath your finger tips
flesh moving softly beneath your lips
it is the exquisitely brutal kiss of a whip
the touch of steel in a wound that just won't heal.

Poetry is the long lost shore
the feeling that everything we think has perhaps been thought before
it tells us that we need not more than we have been given
and that perhaps we are driven
to be more than we could have been.

Poetry is beautiful ecstasy

love lost and yearning to be set free

the whisper of a song in your mind

poetry transcends time.

Poetry is
quiet
found only in the loudest of silences.