This is not a poem 

Because I am not a poet

A poet is a blacksmith who can craft my soul into words

A line into something I feel

A poet dips their pen into the inky darkness of the night sky

Scrawls their words on flesh and make the ordinary new again 

A poet kindles a fire inside me

and that light fills me and empties me in the same moment

A poet is a magician 

The poem is their spell and I am hopelessly enchanted

My eyes made bigger, brighter

Arms longer, stretching out for things I didn't know I needed

I've become simultaneously larger, seeing over things that stood in my way, 

And smaller, humbled beneath the enormity of my world

I have laughed with Seuss in the playground of my childhood

Chased Teasdale and trailed Millay through the thicket of my adolescence

I have shouted my grievances alongside Clare

And conversed with Eady in quiet murmurs

But I am not a poet

And this is not a poem 

Because I wouldn't dare compare the linguistic triumph that is poetry 

To anything my child-hands could make

Instead, I keep pick their words from the air in a library, a coffee shop

And keep them in my pockets like spare change

They slip from my tongue as though they were my own

I am not a dancer because I like the sound of music

but I guess that's never stopped me from moving to the melody

I am not a poet

But I think I'd like to be