Dear Poet

At 2:00 am,

You curl up in your bed with an empty feeling,

trying to make sense of the shadows on your ceiling.

With your vast vocabulary, you feel as strong as you can in this one quiet moment, 

when it swirls like a tornado,

and your thoughts hit the bones like bolts,

It's not easy on you, 

You, my poet, are a bursting flame,

not a flickering candle.

I know, oh you bet, I do.

When you talk pain, it is your mouth that cuts,

And when the tongue slips to similes and metaphors,

It is your heart that slips to stammers,

I have seen you force yourself trying to emphasize a word,

And that way I know, it is your memory that holds those alphabets close,

Like a giant waterfall,

Not holding a thing within, 

You speak and unveil yourself to a room full of strangers,

You rest your tiring spirits in their eyes,

And when they nod together,

Oh I saw you swell up like a tall building in the city lights!

Dear Poet,

When you feel, you really feel.

I know your pen has bled a thousand love poems,

When you caught love first, 

It felt like a firefly got trapped inside the bell jar of your lungs,

And your chest has been glowing like the muse since then,

You find this light in the lover's eyes,

And they have caught you gazing at it like a child discovering his first chandelier,

Dear Poet,

You lil rebel, you have tried to fit in,

You have dealt with their time limits and their rhyme schemes,

Crunched words every now and then,

Just to conform to the size of their sheet,

Your heart pounds to all the rhymes you carry,

And the ones you do not but wish you did.

I know you sit on the rooftops listening to the stories constellations tell,

You have slept with thick books and spent your days hunting for words that say what you already know,

Some days you don't even know what you know.

But did I not tell you already?

You, my poet, are a bursting flame,

And not a flickering candle,

And fire?

What do the arms of the fire long for?

It does not know how to mould itself,

It only knows how to burn.

Dear Poet,

I know,

Oh you bet I do,

Let's just say,

I like to believe that

I am poet, too.