Poems about roads,
poems about ravens,
Poems about monsters,
and poems about roses.

What do they mean? The road is a life,
the raven a regret,
the monster is you
and the rose is-

What.

What happened to this?
Why can't it just be a rose?
A flower with thorns and red petals?

“But the thorns are hardship and-”
No. Don't pretend you understand.
Don't give meaning to the meaningless.
Let the words speak on their own.

Interpret, sure, but don't over-analyze.
Let the words come and flow
unbroken by the lines of a chart,
splitting stanzas and lines into more manageable chunks.

Poetry is an art not meant for a spreadsheet.
Words flow from the heart and the soul,
from the subconscious where meaning is meaningless.

Where poetry remains whole.

I scratch my pen across the page
like a pen scratching across a page,
writing a poem about poetry,
Really.

I write cloud and it means cloud,
I scrawl raven and I mean the bird,
I tap out road, and it refers to the pavement
and when I say rose, I mean rose.

Beauty is not always in complexity,
sometimes it rests in simplicity.
Simplicity of thought and
of interpretation.

When my heart is aching
and I want to cry, how else can that be said?
When I make it an enigma:
crystal drops from earthen orbs

when I say what I want:
I buried my face in my hands
and sobbed.

Both equally beautiful,
both equally poetic
one clearly understood by anyone reading.

Poetry is my art, and I would hate to see it picked apart
like a frog in a biology class.
Each stanza

cut

apart

word by word

and phrase by phrase

to find any hidden meanings therein.

I've hidden nothing.

But don't over-analyze that statement.