What is Poetry?

Words are like peanut butter; without milk they’re too sticky. Poetry is like milk. When your lips are cracking and your mouth is so dry it feels like cotton, that’s poetry. Even though you get a milky coating all in your mouth, it gives you something to think about, something to remember after the actual experience. Leaving you refreshed and nostalgic. Poetry is a whispered pleading to someone who’ll listen, with the hope they won’t fully understand what you’re trying to express. It’s like a fragment of the writer’s soul is in a floating water lily, just out of reach, daring you to lean over and risk falling in the water. Poetry is the soaked feeling of your formal gown against you as you pull up on to the muddy shore with the water lily dangling off of heel of your shoe. Poetry is when words aren’t enough to explain how you feel, but you allow them to try. Poetry is when all things constraining become the tools necessary to rise above.