Somewhere, there is a poem written for you.
Maybe I’m not the one who wrote it,
but somewhere,
someone saw the beauty of your movements
and thought the only way to capture it was with words.
So they put pen to paper,
ink to lines,
and wrote down all your curves and angles.
They toiled,
line by line, letter by letter, and word by word
and when the words united
they made a sentence,
and that sentence made
an arm, a leg, a mind, a person.
Your life wrote poem upon poem
until you had an anthology so thick you had to move on.
And you walked out of that book
with a crooked smile and a determined look
right into the world of the unknown.
But that’s ok because you liked it that way.
The more unfamiliar the better.
It left you room to fill your pages
with your side of the story instead of someone else’s.
You are like some eclectic collector,
storing parts of your life for later,
or in a worse case, a rainy day.
And you don’t collect stories or poetry.
You collect words.
And people would dare try to erase you!
I tried to erase you…
But you never left.
As I looked from a different angle,
seeing if it made any difference then.
But no, you were still there,
broken and bent at your odd angle,
permanent and black on the page.
For my good friend, Rae Snider.