A poet's eyes to see

are just eyes.

Poetry is many things to many people. To me, it is a parsing and a translation. What do you see, and what else, and what else? Rinse in your singular experience, and learn a million times that it's the only one there's ever been. There is nothing new under the sun but the iterative you. That is, yours is the only voice that matters, and this is true 8 billion times.

If you were not here to notice what you notice when you notice it, no one would have noticed. No need to explain spontaneous consciousness, just to honor it.

When you calibrate to beauty, you create it. You continuously choose the depth and breadth of your own world. My best friend took the photo above on a run; she would not call herself a poet, but should.

Open yours.

A classic antithesis of the creative spark is excessive noise. In other words, that damn phone. And in many cases, that wrong person. We owe it to each other to pull out the morphine drip, to bite down and feel it all.

Don't worry: the voice in your head that pulls you apart will still be there, but only one. When it's only one, you can occasionally alchemize it into something like drive. Glimpse the puppeteer of the deaf, blind beast.

Take the time to understand your own taste, the chisel and the anchor. Perform a controlled burn and forgive yourself for the smoke. You will never regret it.