Real Poem
by Lisa CitoreI wrote this poem in response to the shadow who shows up for me in many faces and ultimately within my own self-doubt, who tries to shut down my unique voice.
Don’t ever listen to anyone
who tries to tell you your poem is not a real poem—
that it might be better off kept inside a journal
or rewritten as an essay.
‘Cause maybe what you have to say
is bigger than what will ever fit
into their pretty little prepackaged idea of what a poem is.
Maybe your poem doesn’t want to curl its hair
and shave its legs and put on deodorant
so it will smell more poem-like to stuffy professor types
who only live in third person.
Maybe your poem wants to be a nun belly dancer
who turns into a stream of purple
that spills out over the stars
and eats black holes for breakfast.
Maybe your poem is the wild card kind
that likes to leap from one blue yonder to another—
that would die of boredom
if it had to spend its whole life in philosophical quandary
or romantic blithering
or on a political mission with no sense of humor
or dilly-dallying allowed.
So don’t listen to cynical pseudo anarchists
who tell you what you have to say has been said before—
reducing your poems to common rhetoric,
your thoughts and feelings to assembly line parts,
the same for everyone.
‘Cause words change colors,
carry the DNA of each one’s experience.
And maybe it’s not so much the words,
but the alchemy of your speaking them out loud
right here and now that is the real poem.
Maybe it’s the way you say suckle or witch or breath
that lights a candle in the back row.
So don’t listen to needling know-it-alls who only throw shadows—
to the liar behind the lover
who says you think too much
or the friend who says you’re not thinking clearly
or the mother who only wants you to be happy…
‘Cause if you listen long enough,
those words will cut your hands off,
and teach you how to hold pens in between your teeth.
‘Cause if you let them dare you out on limbs
you couldn’t have braved alone,
those words will turn on you,
take over your life,
make you face the thing you fear the most—
that you just may be
a writer.
