I Think I Could Be a Poet

I think I could be a poet.
Or at least I’ve tried to think I could.
I have no care for grammar
and I twist life rules into single syllables.
I think I could be a poet
I love the way that words taste
and tiny lines fashioned with a single thought
can become masterpieces,
mind bending riddles
and symphonies that crackle your very heart
until it breaks off into three pieces of hopeless
severity.
I think I could be a poet
for I love to sit
and mend my footprints
into rhyming patters
that collide into turning twists.
And I understand that poetry
isn’t just for anyone
but that it is for the brave
and the beautiful
and those who can mold words into waves and formations
that pierce like candied bullets on the tide
right through your heart,
that vicariously stamp and beat on your lungs
until you bleed realization and contemplation
of everything you ever pretended to believe,
leaving you a gasping flake of human,
until all you can manage to scratchily, and uncontrollably whisper
is “wow”.
I think I could be a poet
for to me, each letter has a personality,
each comma is a drug
and every period or exclamation mark
is a gunshot,
one that reverberates
and suffocates.
And no matter what I do,
when I speak truth
I want it to fit like a puzzle in me.
I want it go on paper or a book
so that anyone and everyone
can touch the letters I made connect so perfectly
and they will understand just what I meant.
I think that I could be a poet
or maybe an author.
But we all know how it flows.
How the letters are right in here
but come out a language only I can translate.
And we all know how it goes.
When one person speaks with such fluency
and with magic traces of ecstasy,
seems to silence the world just for a few
minutes, and then I’m up too.
And everyone’s looking at me and my page
hoping my words will leave them in a mess
just as before with the juggler of lyrical phrases and shorts
who seems to speak with pure elegance
as if taught by beautify herself.
And then there’s me
no experience, stories, lost loves to be told
just a pencil and a paper
and maybe guilt unfolding sometime soon
like a broken paper swan
or a, I don’t know,
crinkled alarm clock paper slip,
“I’m late.”
I think I could be a poet.
But, I don’t know,
I haven’t had enough time to think what I want to do
or even be
for me and the world are just getting started.
I think I’m a poet.
Maybe you’ll know when I am.
Or at least that’s my refrain.