POETRY: Poetic Soul by Reggie Drake

A poet's soul is obscure.

Hidden beneath a veil that conceals but not obstructs the maze inside.

The unpronounced voice within speaks in a thousand different words,

spewing colorful and expressive images upon plain white sheets.

The poet is taken to a place.

A place where ideas, thoughts, and feelings,

Can be freed from the mind's prison and released,

Like a caged bird eager to spread its wings and fly.

Can you truly know a poet when he confides in his pad,

And utters only his most deepest contemplations in its understanding ear.

Where he is free from the subjectivity, bias, and criticism that plagues society?

The fire in a man's soul can be set ablaze in the form of imagery and metaphor.

Complex ideas that never reach human ears,

But remain locked inside the poetic soul.

The complexity of these cryptic thoughts,

The order of symbolic phrases,

All personify the vital force that curbs its insatiable appetite,

Pain, Pleasure, Fear, Joy, Thoughts, Feelings

Anything residing in the recesses of the psyche

Anything the poet conceals and hides,

Confides in the soul.

But is this silent utterance really speech,

When such imaginative and creative cognitive thought is trapped and muffled behind the suffocating walls of a Poetry Book;

The Last Great Escape from persecution that the poet shamelessly hides behind.

At some point these words,

These beautiful, resplendent words,

Must escape their solitary confinement.

How long can the soul encumber the overbearing weight

Of a voice echoed constantly over and over again.

Never reaching the pinnacle of its ascension.

Let these silently spoken words loudly bellow to the masses below,

And let those transcendent, angelic wings that once resided within branch out,

And cover regions with its radiant glow.

Let it speak.

Let the poetic soul speak.