Poetry and Me (a poem) (maybe)

I'm not really into poetry. I don't get it. At least that's what I say.

 

Maybe I'm just a prose person.

Prosaic.

With everything that entails.

 

I could care less about meter, and feet, and beat, and things like that.

(Don't ever ask me to drum. It's not pretty.)

Symbols. What are those plums in the icebox, really?

(Aren't they plums?)

I don't get it.

 

But oh, I love Robert Frost and his road less traveled.

And Shakespeare's sonnets, some of them are pretty good too.

And verse novels, although I hardly ever review them because I don't know if they're good poetry and it seems to me

you have to talk about that.

 

And I love to sing. Not just making music, but the flow of the words and how they fit into the notes.

And that's poetry. That has to be.

It's certainly not prose.

Or prosaic.

(I still can't keep a beat. Clapping is ugly too.)

 

Some authors, you know, you have to read out loud.

And that I love too, rolling the words on my tongue like M&Ms.

 

Sometimes, I'll just listen to people talking.

Not to what they're saying, but to the movements of their voice.

The rhythm of their sounds.

(This is even better when they're speaking in a different language.)

Did you know there's a word for that?

Prosody.

The song of the human voice.

 

Maybe it's not that I'm not into poetry.

Maybe I just don't know what it really is.