DEFINITION OF A POEM: NOTES IN VERSE by Aremu Adams Adebisi

We don’t just write a letter, string some
letters into a word, some words or some lines,
a group of words or lines, a long sentence
or another broken off into a clause, a phrase,
a syllabic sound, a morpheme or an inexpressiveness
of what the mind intends, what the heart beats
for in anticipation of meanings, signals
articulated in gestures, endeavours, under
the duress of pain, grief, bliss, memories,
erasures and incomprehension of life’s mystery,
and say we have not written a poem, whereas
a poem is nothing and everything that belongs
to poetry and with consideration for rhetorics
or inconsideration of them, and even of patterns,
structures, components, adhering strictly to rules
or not, overrun with punctuations and without,
communicating a message, feelings or leaving
one with gimp understanding of how the mind works,
hidden or open, personal or shared, soft or congeal,
relatable or felt like the trails of birds in the sky,
explosive or not, inexplicably naming itself in forms,
themes, styles and titles with a concentration
or no concentration like the songs of birds, printed
or unprinted, submitted or kept, lost or found,
original, stolen or imitated from excesses,
inspired in dreams, by humans or nature, coherent
or not that one may know it is something that flows
from the beginning to the end in thirty lines or so,
something like this, without a full-stop, and still
be regarded a simple sentence of no definition