Poetry is my oxygen.

It is the sweet sugar that enters my lungs when those cold and lonely nights threaten to scratch at my already bleeding wounds,

Like nobody is watching.

Poetry is my savior.

I remember the times when I curled up in a corner, nothing but a knife, a scissor to accompany me.

It was those times when I needed to write my every soul wrencing, tear jerking, emotionally draining pain down on paper because for some reason,

God had decided to put me through something I simply couldn't handle.

So much for prayer!

Poetry is life,

 For without it I am dead because if poetry is oxygen, I can't breath without it like a fetus detatched from its mother, I wouldn't survive

Had the words not flown from my fingertips through the pen to the paper I have balled up a thousand times only to uncrumble it and find some shining verse.

The verse that saved my life.

Or maybe it was a line, my play on words that somehow, secretly revealed the light in me that was too afraid to shine

For fear of being snuffed by those too afraid to put into words what they mean and too immature to express how they feel,

So they bully me with their fists but that's not nearly the worst part.

It's their eyes that hurt the most when they look down on me.

Because I am a Black girl fighting with her light skin because they've always told me I'm not "White" enough to be White,

and a real Black girl must have higher levels of melanin,

Which in turn would darken her skin.

So I speak to the paper, with flowered words and blurred vision,

My tears dying the paper I am fortunate enough to find while sifting through the garbage that is my being, and that's what they've made sure I'd be disgraced to.

But I think they all forgot that the trash of one is the treasure of another,

And through these varying lines and broken sentences,

Hiding somewhere, I have managed to find the treasure inside myself,

But not without the help of the pen.

The pen that is an extension of my heart and a replacement for the blade.

Poetry is oxygen, for without it I can't breathe.

I can't absorb the beauty of the world around me, but here, in this cold and lonely night I have figured it out.

A way to love myself even when no one else can,

Because everyone is so afraid of vulnerability, but not me.

I am poetry.