This Is Not What It Seems

One thing I love about poetry is how metaphor and story can hold truth. My poems are moments in time, feelings translated into stanza. And although all my work holds truth, it is not always objective truth. It is truth in feeling, truth in the moment, truth in theme.

I think people often approach poetry or song as if it is autobiography or fact. But poetry lives in a different kind of truth. It can be emotionally true without being literally true.

The poets, mystics, philosophers, and prophets have always shared truth through metaphor, parable, and song. In the Psalms, grief becomes poetry addressed to God. In parables, meaning is carried through story rather than explanation. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, truth itself is revealed indirectly, through shadow and interpretation rather than direct sight. Across literature and fiction, imagined lives often reveal real emotional truths about fear, love, loss, and longing. Across cultures and time, meaning has often been carried not through direct explanation, but through story, through symbols that point toward something larger than themselves. These forms of language do not always tell us what happened in a literal sense, but they often tell us something essential about what it means to be human.

I think I am drawn to that kind of language because literal truth has never been enough for me on its own. Facts explain what happened, but they do not always explain what it felt like, or what it meant, or why it stays. Poetry lets me stay inside those questions longer. It lets contradiction exist without needing to resolve it immediately. It lets memory, emotion, and meaning overlap without forcing them into a single fixed version of reality.

That is often how I experience my own writing. Not as a record of events, but as a way of holding what cannot be fully said in any other form. A moment becomes a metaphor. A feeling becomes an image. A memory becomes something slightly transformed so that it can be carried.

That is the kind of truth I am trying to write toward.

The Treachery of Images (1929), René Magritte

"This is not a pipe."