I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in English. I believe in English, in the language and the subject. I believe in eternal words and I believe in Reluctance and Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening and I believe that Nothing Gold Can Stay so instead we immortalize all things golden by putting pen to paper. I am a poet. I am a poet because I like verses. I like verses that end unevenly. I like verses that end unevenly and give the poem a shape, that give the poem a form more than just ‘free verse’ or ‘ballad.’ I like verses that breathe life back into the flattened version of the trees that we write them on. I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in words. I believe in words and phrases and metaphors and similes all coming together like bones, each letter a joint or tendon, all strung and pieced together to create something hauntingly beautiful.

I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in thought. I believe in thought and in genius. I believe that genius can sprout from a single moment. That at any time and in any place inspiration can strike and fill your head with thoughts you never would have thought to think of. I believe that those thoughts can grow branches and leaves and roots that ground you into the person you are supposed to become. And I believe in opening my mind as if I am the sail, letting the wind catch in the whisperings of my soul, pushing me through this ephemeral infinity we call life. I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in imagination. I believe that imagination gives us the courage to dream and gives us the confidence to pursue those dreams the way a child pursues fireflies in the garden. I believe that imagination is freedom from the shackles of what we cannot do and ‘I can’t’ is a vague and invalid excuse created by people who stopped dreaming when they woke up.

I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in dreaming. I believe that nothing is too far out of reach. I believe in impossibility and distrust possibility because who ever got anywhere by just doing the possible. It’s only impossible until somebody proves the critics wrong and I believe that we are all somebody. I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in beauty. I believe that life is beautiful even when it’s ugly. I believe that Beauty and Ugly are like the sun and the moon, forever chasing each other until they eclipse as the rest of the world watches in awe. As the rest of the world questions the concept of beauty as an adjective rather than a form. I am a poet. I am a poet because I believe in magic. I believe that life is a magical. I believe that life is the wizard and we are all cauldrons, bubbling to the brim with hopes and dreams and ambitions, ready to spill over into the chaotic beauty that is human existence.
I am a poet. I am a poet because I am human. I am a form of life, pieced together by individual atoms. I am a portrait of scars and stories. I am flesh and bone and space and stars and moonlight. I am wind and rain and fire and sky and earth and someday I will be nothing but earth and until then, I am a poet. I am a poet because I am haunted. Haunted by memories and haunted by demons because they are memories too. And each one a shark, smelling blood in the water, coming to collect the hurt that I owe. Mercilessly banging and Banging and BANGING until I wield my pen and grant them the freedom they seek on blank pages because after all, I am a poet. I am a poet because life is my journal and I am the ink. I am the ink sinking into the paper like blood, spilling across into the words and phrases and verses running through my veins, into the words and phrases and verses I am too afraid to say. I am the scribbles running through the words that never come out right because life is not perfect, because I am only human, genetically programmed to make mistakes. And because life does not come with an eraser.

I am a poet because I have known pain. I am a poet because I have also known love and because I know that love and pain are two sides of the same coin. I have known sleep filled days and sleepless nights and it’s 3am staring at the ceiling. I have known midnight drives with music so loud it drowns out my mind. I have blushed like roses in Spring and fallen like leaves in Autumn. I have known loving someone else more than myself and then learning that my first love should always be myself. I have known "I love you," and "I love you but I can’t do this anymore." I have known love that feels like shooting stars and planets aligning. I have also known heartbreak that feels like every bone is splintering and shattering, like a glass that falls from shaking fingers. And I have known the way tears create watercolor paintings over ink stains, but I am not a painter. I am a poet.