This is what is making me smile today. This is what is making me wear my heart on my sleeve: something someone I don't even know wrote, but it means many things to me. I have to remember to thank them for it.

This is a mantra for all the girls and boys who tried but found they never could, who dreamed but never touched the stars. The outcasts and misfits and broken hearted heros and witch babies. This is a mantra for those who said "cannot" but never meant it- who kept on dreaming and trying and being, past failures and mishaps and worlds gone wrong. We are the broken ones, the confused lilies growing away from the sun, we are not quite right and not all there. The world will try and convince us of our failures, give us reasons to cry. The world will scorn us- they will make us believe we have done something wrong. "You are not a poet, a dancer, an artist, a dreamer. You are a failure. Stop trying, quit."

And maybe they are right. We are not poets or dancers or artists or dreamers. We are so, so much more. We are creation and imagination in their human forms, we are the sunlight and dust motes streaming in through Saturday windows. We are the high notes and choruses and soaring voices- we are bass notes and guitar riffs and melodies and drum beats. We are slant rhyme rhythms and abbreviated sayings and we are lace and velvet and rose gardens. It is as if our souls were dipped in ink to scrawl lovely sentences across the page. It is as if we are created to be seen; lovely girl paintings covered in oils and pastel wax. We are not poets, no, we are poems. Love poems, epics, haikus. Every word and syllable carved into our DNA, you can hear this whisper of poetry when we smile and when our hearts beat. We are not dancers, we are the very dance. Can you see the pirouettes and shuffles and tangoes in our irises, Degas' girls ricocheting through our souls in little tutus? Can't you see that we are so much more? We may not be millionaires, with published books and houses full of fine art and craft workshops and ballet studios baring our name. We may not walk runways or design clothes. We may not see our photographs on the cover of Vogue. We may only find the fruit of our work in handmade journals, locked key diaries, websites and flyers, but if you saw us, if you really saw us, then you would know. We are the dreams, the dance, the art. We are the light and the shadow, the photograph pixel. We are not the poets, we are the poems.

If you cannot be the poet, be the poem. - David Carradine.

That, and this.

Please read them. I hope they will make you feel something, even if it's nothing like what I feel. Please, just feel.