I am not a poet.
I am only a wanderer in the marketplace of words,
a fool who follows the glimmer of syllables
as others follow the scent of bread.
Poetry is not ink on paper.
It is the pulse beneath the page
a breath moving through the hollow reed of the poet,
a secret that leans close to the ear of the heart.
When I meet a poem, I bow.
I circle it once,
then twice,
then again,
as though it were a shrine whose mystery
can never be entered in a single step.
Each reading strips away a veil.
Sometimes the veil is my own blindness,
sometimes the poet’s mercy in hiding the flame
until I am ready.
There are nights I leap from sleep crying, I have it!
and mornings when the truth laughs,
gently reminding me:
Child, that was only the shadow of the meaning
come back, and drink deeper.
Poetry is a journey without map or return.
It is the caravan of joy
that passes through my heart again and again.

Once, the word was a whisper
carved into a cave wall
by a man who saw lightning
and wanted to marry it.
He did not know grammar,
but he knew:
****.
It is the sound a soul makes
when it remembers it left the stove on
in a past life.
It is a sneeze of truth,
a hiccup of the cosmos,
a four-letter eclipse
of reason and restraint.
“****,” says the poet,
when words betray him.
“****,” says the scientist,
when atoms refuse to behave.
It is the punctuation of panic,
the jazz note in an otherwise silent scream,
the laugh-track of God.
It means everything
when you don’t mean anything,
and it means nothing
when you feel everything.
It is both
the crime
and the confession.
The knock, the door, the absence of door.
So how do you write it?
You don’t.
You exhale it through clenched teeth
as you fall in love with a mistake.
You etch it into the back of a napkin
after three whiskeys and a revelation.
You scream it into a pillow
until the pillow understands.
Then you kiss it.
And never speak of it again.