I Am Not a Poet

I am not a poet

But I have a friend who is.

Disguised in primary colors

And holes in her chest

She can speak and write

Words of the same language but of another kind

As if spoken from somewhere other than her gift-bow mouth

I am not a singer today.

My throat is dry and burnt.

My diaphragm deflated.

My muse is dead.

My score book is lost.

But my brother hums along to the blooms of his guitar

I am not a mathematician,

I dropped out at fourteen

When the numbers stopped making sense

And my thighs got soft and lean.

But I have a friend who sketches

And figures out the math

But unless my pen wants to write

And my brain is limp and chaste

I am not a dancer

My legs move hard and fast in mismatched socks.

But my sister used to leap

From balance beams to rocks

Pointing her toes like her body was made for grace

The lovely thing about this world is that we did not create it

There is no criteria, no police, no observer

We keep what we have no use for, we speak to what does not stroke us,

The world shares what it could hoard

In the interest of honestly, I should tell you

You are probably an intricate part of this world

A block in a jenga puzzle which if pulled out

Would collapse it from the bottom up

You are probably a poet, a dancer, a singer, a mathematician

But even if you're not

Who’s counting?