In the rain

puddle broken clouds

I step in it

Sometimes a poem is like a puddle with beautiful clouds appearing and disappearing in it and writing it ruins everything. Is that an acceptable use of the word ‘poem’? If not – and by ‘that’ I mean the context that has seemed to support that use (perhaps the analogy between the uselessness of puddles and poems in our culture)– then what do we mean by the word poem? Lots of different kinds of writing? Any kind we call poetic? We may find out that we need that extra-literary meaning of poem — poem as puddle –at least provisionally, for the conversation.