The Substance Of Elocution Poem by Bill Upton

Poetry doesn't fit in a bottle.
It represents the edge,
The borderline
Between sanity and insanity,
Dreams and reality,
Love and hate,
Loss and gain,
Hopelessness and euphoria,
Memory and discard.
It does so in a way
That tour guides it to the very gut
Of the most primitive emotion.
It jackhammers, torturously, final nerve endings.
It speaks in complexities and in gibberish.
It uses more intensity and thought to describe
Than do words coming from the evening news.
It isolates, in an eclectic manner of communication,
Problems, feelings, confusions, failures,
Virtue, bravery, truth, righteousness.
It is not the language of the king.
It is the speech and the intuitive thoughts
Of the common man.
It is written by dreamers for dreamers,
For those who don't surrender at the windmills of Don Quixote.
It is for the desolate, searching for the North Star,
The jilted lover chasing a ghost in the dark.
It is the paycheck for the unemployed,
The 'real' opiate of the masses.
Poetry takes the microscopic cell of human thoughts
And dissects it with precise interpretation.
For all of its' intentions,
Poetry solves nothing,
But to a greater good,
It offers the fresh glance,
A deeper search into how to view small things
And make them large,
How to take memories and 'colorize' them.
It is not meant to save souls.
It is meant to navigate the verbal core of the mind
And calculate sensibility, with x-ray interpretations,
Of simple and complex human potpourri,
Forever crossing the line.