Please Don’t Take My Poetry So Damn Literally

Poetry isn’t literal.

Please don’t take me literally in a poem.

Poetry is channeled from the heavens. It’s a lightning bolt of art through my head that shakes in through my spine and out through my mouth.

Poetry is not an opinion piece.

Poetry is not a space where I sit down across from you and tell you all my feelings and thoughts.

A poem is a feeling, a thought—transient, passing, gone.

Half the time it comes flowing through me and I don’t even always understand or agree with the lines—but they are there demanding to be written.

And if I change them, my hand is slapped because I’m not even convinced that my poetry that comes is always my own.

Sometimes it’s wicked. Sometimes it’s so sweet it will make you cry. Sometimes it’s so sad your heart will clench and your hands will tingle. Sometimes it’s so angry your fingers will be burnt just touching it. Sometimes it’s so gentle you barely feel it at all.

The gift and magic of poetry is that it comes unannounced, unexplained and uninstructed.

I choose poetry or poetry chooses me because it is raw, it is free and there are no rules.

Sometimes the words that come I think are horse shit garbage, and yet someone will cry for it was for them.

Sometimes I am so proud when I write a piece I walk as tall as the heavens, and people walk by uninterested.

Sometimes I write something and you take me literally to which I pull my hair and eyeballs and wish you’d educate yourself that poetry is never literal.

Who the fuck ever knew what Shakespeare was saying?

It’s metaphors on romantic fuzz on metaphors from the heavens.

Please, don’t take my poetry so damn literally.

A poem will never encompass or explain or encapsulate all that I feel or think or am.

If you crucify me for a poem, you are crucifying the heavens for the poems they do not even belong to me—I swear.

That is not non-accountability—that is truth and if you wrote poetry you’d understand.