You're Looking in the Wrong Place

Should you seek to find me in a volume of language 

Look me up on a page and be given my definition

Understand me in a moment's reading

You will fail.

Your critical eye, rendered useless.

Should you flip through the leaves and dwell on each letter

You MIGHT begin to piece me together; 

I am dance and I am stillness, 

I am courage and I am cowardice, 

I am society and I am solitude, 

I am wisdom and I am folly,

I am monumental and I am diminutive, 

I am every word and none of them. 

Yes, even though you ponder until your library closes

Until viewing hours are over 

You will still be left unsettled;

Uneasy because you know you do not know me

No, not for all your research

Because I am NOT a topic

There is always the spiritual and phantasmogorical that cannot be articulated

Mysterious swaths of my psyche 

Which you will not pull up out of the paper

Which you cannot dust off and open to examine

If you want to read my mind

Don't read a book. Read my eyes.

Why would you look for a four dimensional person on a two dimensional page?

I was not formed through ink

I am not amalgamations of an alphabet 

I am not a character. I am not typed up from characters. I HAVE character.

I was created from blood

I shaped myself through sweat

I hardened with tears 

Can you feel those in your dictionary?

Will the dictionary bleed and sweat and cry for you?

Is the dictionary me?

You ask, then, how I define myself.

I don't define myself. 

I am undefinable. 

Because I am not a concept, 

I am not an object,

I am not an event.

I am a person.