There is no such thing as poetry!

Just speak! No — bellow!

Do not contort yourself. Those screams in your gut were meant to echo through mountain ranges. Do not place them in a closet shoebox.

Do not “try” to make it sound pretty, do not “try” to make it poetry— else, what was meant to be the liberation of your soul will become its jail cell. 

Every poem: a love letter, a confession. A love letter to yourself, to the natural world, to another. Write it for the ears of to whom the letter is dedicated— not for the eyes of who might later stumble upon it, who might judge whether this love was love. 

No, there is no such thing as poetry. Do not look at a paper and say, “I am going to write a poem.” Look at your heart and ask what it has to say. Do not judge its answer. Give it the pen. Do not stand in the way. The river will flow. You will later look and say: that is a poem. Almost by accident, it happened.

More important than the what of your writing is the why, the why is where the “poem” exists. “Why” is the lifeblood of human existence; the lifeblood of human existence is poetry’s ink.