Poetry is hard.

While some can artfully craft the written word into a song of joy, triumph, lamentation or despair

poetic prose and symbolic simile are definitions on my english assignment, not tools to coalesce the emotion and experience and knowledge that is me and my soul

I have read poetry written by the inspired, crafted by the talented, collections and anthologies of endless charactors and symbols on clean paper, somehow containing the dirt and despair and desire of human experience and mortality in those crisp characters.

Life - and endless multiverse of brilliant color and mesmerizing pattern, intertwined with sensation and texture and emotion and intuition. There isn't enough ink in my pen to capture even the tiniest sliver of such a robust collection of experience and education, existance and imagination.

But it should be easy! They say

Poetry is endlessly customizable, no rules to follow, no requirements, no boundaries.

Also no guidance, no parameters, no wrong (and therefor no right) answers. 

Speak your heart! They say

My heart is a pump, a biological miracle that makes my position in the universe possible, an invaluable cog in the ticking clock that is my body, my vessel, my instrument with which I experience the marvelous and mediocre of the universe

but it doesn't write poetry. I asked.

Even figuratively, this metaphorical organ of emotional and illogical but meaningful and necessary conciousness doesn't speak the eloquent language of metre and verse, assonance and alliteration, when even the experience of humanity and life and existance is too complex to fit into a lifetime of thought, how can a few lines of language contain the depth and breadth of even a single experience or idea or sensation

How I long for a carefully structured essay, the universally accepted parameters paradoxically freeing the river of my thoughts and emotions, focusing the cacophony of voices and thoughts into an informative, concise, and convincing dissertation on any of an infinite number of topics where fact and feeling, logic and language combine as lines of melody and harmony in a symphony of meaning! Ingredients in recipie for double chocolate chip and walnut cookies that are not only delicious, but can communicate with unbridled passion and power the summation of a set of circumstances and series of studied situations culminating in a single, undeniable conclusion. An answer to the questions that were asked.

But poetry is hard. The blank canvas entices the spirit and soul, whispering gently that anything is possible, doable, writable! Freedom from order and law! Convention and tradition! Embrace your inner soul and burst forth from your shell of custom and grammar in a spill of language! 

And I try! I really do! But the vapor of my existance and experience suddenly condences into a unstemmed flood, a thundering roar of a million voices all shouting about which experience or idea should be shared first! The usual gentle flow of thought to language to text becomes instantly congested by the conflict in my own being. Only through careful, laborous, thoughtful effort can I pluck each word from the swirling sea of inspiration, too many hitting an invisible obstacle on the tip of my tongue and disappearing in a puff of frustration before straggling like their relatively sucessful kin to be painstakenly entered in the jagged, unorganized, jumbled, absent-minded excuse for poetry.

Poetry is too hard, because it is too easy. too easy to be led astray by impulsive thoughts that wander away from the path like red-riding hood on the way to grandma's house, but instead of ending up in th forest meeting a wolf, I wind up writing shy of 600 words, none of which sound quite like I hear them in my own head.

I should have written an essay.