The invention of poetry

I never liked poetry.

Frustrated
by rules
and precision.
Tired of sitting
and thinking
what rhymes with my last line...
am I coupletting correctly?

Who made these rules?

Not poets.

We, The Normal People,
so in awe of your word magic.
We dissect.
We count syllabus.
Trying to find the science behind the trick,
the slight in the hand.

I never liked poetry.

Until I read some
and wrote some
and realized:
I am not a scientist.
I am not the normal people.
I do not dissect.

I make the rules.

So go ahead
Count my syllables.
Measure my voice.
Analyze my worth.
Someday, you will imitate my structure.
I invented poetry.

Saint Edna spoke to me,
carved her words into my skin,
Like lined paper,
always where they were meant to be.

She sang about the wide open spaces.
About the girl who sang colored pebbles.
About fog so thick, it swirls as you move through it.
About loving someone so much it breaks your heart to look at them,
and about the loneliness that comes from walls like ours.

I read books about childhood and adventure,
books that had plot and point,
and then I read about a little girl
who lived in a house,
on a street named after fruit,
about how aweful it is to be young.
How beautiful and horrid life is.
And she was like me, a red balloon.
She sang in my key.

Sarah writes about food and love.
About messes and remembering.
about sisters and forgetting.

These are my saints.

Edna sang about sadness.
Sandra sang about sadness.
Sarah sang about food and sadness.
And I harmonized,
with my snap crackle voice.
It's broken notes and misplaced vibratos
Sobbing songs that we feel in the hollows of our chest,
like chocolate bunny hearts, that shatter when you press your thumbs in.
That same hollow breaking
mutilates the form and figure
and anyone lucky enough to not know
will look at it and ask,
what is this supposed to be?