Violet Llewellyn (July 25,1992 / Outer Space)

Poetry is the collateral damage from dreaming.
It’s a horror of thought and images tumbled together,
Things you see that are not really there.

There are no pictures in your dreams,
Only the half-forgotten memories of sound,
And the pieces of time’s framework strewn about.
You make the pictures yourself.

When you remember these things that were half-forgotten,
Returned again and lost you receive poetry,
Wrapped in swaddling blankets and shining anew.
No one can realize that it is truly just a mish-mash of rehashing,
Or that it has been said time and again.

It is a work, solitary,
And if they tried to write the same thing,
From the same images that are not really images,
They would get something totally different.

In that is the definition of poetry,
When dreams shatter and you reform the pieces in a self-portrait,
Unique because you are.