What makes a good poem? Does it need to rhyme? Should it mean something to you? These are the questions I ask myself every time I write a poem. Well those are the questions I used to ask myself anytime I wrote a poem. Then I stopped caring if it rhymed or made sense to anyone that wasn’t me. I stopped worrying about what made a poem good and just wrote what was in my heart at the time. Why I can write a poem better with a battered heart than when I’m content in my feelings? That I may never have the answer to. If I just wanted to sit and write a poem it’s hard and I find I have nothing to say but in that moment when you feel like your world is crashing down all around you the words come from some place deep within your soul that you didn’t even know existed until this moment. The moment when your heart was open, raw, exposed in such a way that you didn’t want anyone to see. But instead of shielding your heart away you show it along with your soul to anyone would would listen in words. Not actions but words. Words are powerful alone but together they can be unstoppable. Words have the power to turn a bad day good and a good day bad. Writing the words of my heart places a balm to my soul. It’s uplifting and helps ease what was broken. It helps cleanse me of the emotion by putting it on paper. If written correctly if can cause the emotion again when read later. It will bring up the memory of those words and make you feel again what you felt when you wrote it. It this a good thing? Sometimes it is because if I can’t feel the same emotion I was feeling when I originally wrote it then I didn’t capture it correctly. Why am I rambling on about a bunch of nonsense? Well it’s because I can’t write. I’ve been trying the last two days. I’ve got nothing. Tried to finish a poem that’s pretty much almost finished and I’m at a loss for the words. I remember why I was writing it but don’t know how to close it. It’s quite annoying. I did manage to write a bit on the follow up to my first novel but it’s not the same as poetry. I wanted to get back into it. It was my first love when I started writing after journaling. Now it’s like I can’t do it unless I feel like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. I want to do it when I’m happy and not just when I’m sad. They say “practice makes perfect”, but how am I supposed to practice writing when it’s so emotionally based for me? Writing without the emotion doesn’t seem real to me. It just seems like I’m trying to make everything rhyme, because good poetry doesn’t necessarily have to rhyme. It just has to have emotion. Atleast that’s my opinion anyway.