Poetry blossoms. Poetry exhales. Poetry rises like open palms to the dawn, like a hymn. It swoops and soars and claws tangibility – blunted mate of a poem’s imagined sharpness. Poetry expands and contracts, rears and strikes. It captures and coddles and cuts; it iterates. But it is impure. Most do not have to see the rough, uncut shining. It is the poets who must sit with broken butterfly nets sticky with sweetness and hope. It is the poets who must witness their blinded minds torn open by curious inspiration. It is the poets who burn, who crumble, who cry. And it is the poets who must rise again, bruised and violated, open and vulnerable, to dangle their sanities as pitiful lures for a carnivorous creativity. They are the conduits, the safeguards, the prophets. All else – the dull minds, the mocking fireflies to a poet’s unwilling inferno – can slumber in shut security. All else see only the softness in syllables, in silly rhymes, in crooning schoolboy love songs.