Not Everything Is Poetry

I. Not Everything Is Poetry. some things are ugly, or just motion. only your hands kneading the air all the way to empathy’s shore, memorial just across the water, oblivion a low rumble under the sand.

Everything Is Not Poetry; some things are just those; no shape beyond their outlines standing before me, silhouettes gushing about geometry. no substance beyond their fleshy hearts and all the lives they’ve ridden along the way, muscles writhing with memory.

some stops are just torn edges; never amputees or a binding and an absence, years pillaged from a tragically full life.

some silences are not versed; maybe the niche left by an excavated sound, white noise in its transparency.

Poetry Lyndsey Coleman

Pleasanton, California, USA

Not Everything Is Poetry; some words are fleeting fact over lyric, though they glow when soaked in song, faces backlit by their contentment. not frivolous or florid, though they may find communion among the roses.

II. Not Every Blue Is The Ocean; each shade cannot hold its depth, its capacity for opalescence. some things are just cerulean, like crying in concept. tears hold no color but the one ascribed granting life to the feeling it wields in tow.

Not Everything Felt Holds A Feeling; your salvation’s voice cannot Trojan Horse emotion to your doorstep, no matter how its rhythms may beat down the doors of your heart. the welts down your back— raised like the dead—are of the mind’s making, a placebo like Poe’s.

Not Everything Has A Name, just a crafted shape in each of our mouths, the taste often more distinct than the sight of its mien. Not Every Bird Is A Sign, though they line the road, the rooftops, just the same; though you may feel them in the air—the whir past your ear when you turn to shake them from your periphery. the way their forms disintegrate, inversely timed with how they materialize behind your eyes.

you close them to find one and open them to wake; is it therefore the less gone?

Not Every View Is Beautiful; the lungs of these sights do not shrink or swell with your temper, its metric in the vanishing arch of your brow. beauty cannot live on in the distance between your eyes, nor the slope and return of your cupid’s bow, how it won’t ebb and flow with the lull of your speech.

Not Everything Is Matter; hold your atoms of the mind.