The Definition of POET:

1. A sad girl with letters for teeth. Rilke says, bleed for the ink, write
because silence is to die; this is how I was born, burning alliterations
in my bones. My mother taught me to keep pens in my clenched fists,
to kill the words before I kiss them. My father taught me what ink
tastes shoved under fingernails, what it is to have veins of carbon
black. I have always stuffed my mouth with ragged adverbs, trying to
find something sweet under all this viscera. Age six to age sixteen: I
never stopped bleeding.
2. A boy with bombs on his tongue. Every period is the dust of
Hiroshima settling against his skin. In this sun-stained atmosphere,
the biggest hands are the ones that have learned both to bend and
break. I once met a man who told me he wrote himself a noose
because he would die for ink and paper, and I watched as prose
wreaked havoc with his bones. Thousands dead, smeared sentence
fragments all scattered on our toppled landscape. Boom. Boom.
Boom.
3. A scared child who cannot cry for help, who hides behind their
pretty words and trusts people to fall in love with being broken. I was
taught that nobody cares if you are screaming, they will not hear the
gunshots, the commas used like bullet wounds. There is no casual
way to mention you are a blazing forest on the inside. Someone once
read this poem and asked if I was okay, and I said yes Im fine. Im
fine.
"Despite being a poet, I am not known to be good with words: I never
told you that I loved you. You never taught me how."
Nobody warned me that the days I tried to swallow my words would
leave me coughing up nouns, shattered glass across the floor.
Bleed for the ink. Write because silence is to die.
--Define A Poet.

A poem by Hillary Bowman