Ars Poetica - Defining What Defines Me

Sitting in front of paper and pen, in front of my laptop,
My eyes blur out of focus as I try to think of defining poetry.
What does it mean to me? What use is it to anyone?
Las palabras bailan sensualmente, intricate and enticing.
I forget meanings and language barriers, but there's a deadline.
Will what I come up with be satisfactory or intelligible to anyone?
Will you like it? Will you accept me for whom I wish to be accepted as?

Mixing words as the warmth of sun's rays play on my right arm,
while the moon sits atop the roof of Bush Science Center,
I type and retype, pausing to find a way to explain what I am - what poetry is. Rising further and further into the sky (or are we sinking and rotating?), the moon distances itself, taking part in a cosmic dance we are too small to understand but for thousands of years scientists and poets have tried to capture and understand it.

The memories created, lived, seen, imagined, remembered, they nag, like a flame to a wick, begging to be recorded. I have been lit from the inside out and am still burning up in desperate ways - burning with the passion to take words and make sense and beauty of them. Brillando en la oscuridad, mi llama baila como las palabras elusivas, acariciada con el amor de un susurro. Will the candle or the flame be blown away with a whisper?

That elusive detail
(feelings of love and inspiration,
creation and destruction,
bloomings of flowers and crescendos in sonatas,
the flight of a bird or the flight of passion,
el aroma de tu piel acariciando la mia,
kisses to soothe passionate bites on sensitive all too-human flesh -
real or imagined)
begs to be understood and immortalized -
can I do it justice?

Poetry: a song that touches the deepest, most hidden parts of hearts with strains and ink-stains so melancholy or hauntingly beautiful  that goosebumps spread across forearms and lives change.
Will it touch yours?
Will you let it?