poets and poetry and poems

Some of my best friends are poets I have never met. To them I am a nameless, faceless reader. I'm not even that. They don't know I've spent nights crying with them, laughing with them, smoking cigarettes with them.
I've loved poetry always. I can't really remember a point in time where I wasn't scribbling pretty words in tiny notebooks.
Last night I fell asleep with poetry in my bed. Dickens in one hand, Cummings in the other. I was cross examining what makes a poet speak to people. Poetry is reactive and poetry is active. Some people feel things when they hear music, or see art, others feel things when they read words. See words. These same people can become words. I think words are the best thing we have in this life. We can chose to explain things eloquently, abruptly, or even communicate with the absence of words. The drive to be, and to be on paper exists intrinsically. Those of us born with pencils in our hands and heavy words on our hearts, we will never let you die.
You are the characters in our books, the inspiration for our poems and you are quotations turned to fiction. If you haven't had a chance to fall in love with some poetry, you should. You will find more than you excepted about yourself and about this world. My hope for you is to find some poetry that is active and makes you reactive. Maybe even so reactive, you'd like to write some yourself.
Because poetry speaks to people. Poetry can change people. Quite often though, people are too busy for poetry. Poets are a lot like you and me. They eat lonely breakfasts and sit in traffic. They find quarters in vending machines and recycle their plastic. The only difference is they find a deeper meaning in all of this, one you will start to see too, if you just start to notice.