self portrait

I’ve never claimed to call myself a poet,

ask him, he knows.

through I love the rhythm, the rhyme, the duet!

I tend to favor prose.

I’ve written words over melody,

piano, guitar, and timpani,

yet words alone on white paper

tend to scare me, somehow.

In high school poetry was seen as a chore,

incessant, depressing, confusing, a bore.

Seventeen and starving over Sylvia Plath,

exasperated sighs and one desperate laugh.

Rip it all to shreds! I said,

your color-coded, pretentious mess!

there’s a comfort to the structure and the rhyme,

though again and again, time after time,

the words I latch on to most affectionately

are the ones that completely disrupt me,

and send a shiver down my spine.