(15) I'm not supposed to be a poet.

(15) I'm not supposed to be a poet.

Lately I've been thinking I'm not supposed to be a poet

that I am not that architect

that's welding word to word to structure bridges

that are long enough to bring the world together

I'm not qualified

to write poems I can trust not to collapse

beneath the feet of the people I've been trying to lift up

and I've been trying

convinced that I am some kind of gardener

that if I just take in the perfect seeds

then poetry would start to grow inside of me,

that it would bloom out of my mouth

and sprout out of my fingertips

and crawl out of my eyeballs,

I would come alive

so I've been eating like 12 helpings each

of granola bars and sunsets and the whole world's brokenness,

cause that's what poems are made of, right?

And I tried to fertilize these seeds

with other poets' pre-processed emotions

spent hours surfing youtube hoping it would grow me

but it didn't do a thing

because I already know how to sound poetic

I already know how to operate inside the six orthodox topics

of spoken word poetry;

it's all love and sex

and political oppression,

and the next generation,

and life as a minority,

and the nature of divinity

and... oh yeah...

POETRY.

And while we're speaking in convention,

I might as well mention that I can create

a cocktail of metaphors

perfectly mixed to mess with my audience's heads,

make them drop inhibitions they didn't even know they had,

yeah,

I know how to sound poetic

I can even craft my pace and cadence

to elevate my language into prophecy

then pause

right when you were thinking that you needed time

to process

yes, I can read this script

my only question is, who wrote it,

cause this used to be the art form of the rainbow-colored underclass

breaking expectations to join excellence with true expression

but now it's just a safe release for angsty hipsters

and Canadians

no offense if you're either

I'm just trying to be honest,

to be honest, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to

'be a poet'

if all it means is crafting poem-shaped emotions

just to make them sound acceptable/accessible

but sometimes

right when I'm trying to sleep

or when I'm thinking about people that I've only seen in dreams

or even when I'm walking down the street

poetry finds me

see, poetry's my predator

and I am just

prey

ing that I find the strength to overcome the urge to run away

as it makes me

a poem.