In which I teach my grandpa what poetry is.

My grandpa and I went out for pie today. We had a conversation in which I told him about how I was writing poetry now, and he wanted to know what exactly I meant by that. He, being an old person (and I can't blame him for this), asked if I meant I write rhyming sing-songy stuff.

I told him no, I wrote completely different things, and then I had to define poetry for him. I don't think I've ever tried to define poetry for someone else before. After some awkward attempts at calling it "lyrical, metrical writing" (I realized that this was obviously false) and "creative not-fiction broken up with lines", I pulled a little scrap of paper from the notebook I was writing in, and wrote this:

This is an example
of a poem. It doesn't
rhyme and
it has no identifiable
meter, but it is a
poem.

Poetry belongs everywhere,
even (especially)
amongst the
artificial sweeteners.

I then placed the poem amongst the artificial sweeteners on the table in the hopes that whoever sat there next would find it and be interested in what it had to say. I have no way of knowing what happened to that tiny poem, but I'd like to imagine it made the other person's day a little more surreal and that they possibly learned something from it.

My grandpa and I left immediately after that. I like to think he learned something from it, and I like to think I benefited from having to explain my craft and discovering I was unable to do without using it to explain itself.