Heartsong

I thought I'd write a haiku, and then this poem would be over quickly and I could move on with my life. Because haiku is easy; it's just five, seven, five, no rhymes, just syllables. So I sat down to write it, and I started thinking about subject matter, and I realized that I wasn't going to be able to write a haiku. My spirit cannot be contained in five, seven, five. My heart - the essence of my writing and my spark - cannot spill itself in five, seven, five. Because I am a speak aloud poet, I am a speak a aLOUD poet and I will not constrain myself to five, seven, five. That's not to say that haiku can't be beautiful, but the people who write them have hearts that work better in seventeen syllables than mine ever could. Because I am a speak aloud poet and one of the problems with transcribing speak aloud poems is knowing where to put the line breaks, because if you hand someone a chunk of a paragraph, they'll say, "That's not poetry," and if you break it into lines, into pieces that were never meant to be, you won't have a speak aloud poem but a word. Word. Word word. Pause. Stop poem and I will not break my heart for that. I want to write poetry with lines so long they make Walt Whitman laugh with joy and Emily Dickinson blanch with horror because my lines are longer than north and south and I am farther than east and west and I am a speak aloud poet, I am a free verse poet, and I am not here to tell you how a butterfly flies and I am not here to tell you why a tree grows and I am not here to tell you about boy meets girl meets love meets somewhere over the rainbow. I am here to tell you who I am and that I am free. I am freedom because I am a speak aloud poet, I am a free verse poet and I will not be silenced. I will not back down because of can't, couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't, haven't, hadn't, mustn't, don't, didn't; I will not keep my silence for them because they cannot hold me. And that is why I cannot write haiku, because
five, seven, and five
syllables in a haiku
but I am a speak aloud poet, I am a free verse poet, and this is my heart.