I am a liar.

It's a hard thing to admit, but there it is. Just a few days ago, a friend, after reading some recent poems, reached out to me to make sure that I was "okay." It seemed to him that I was going through some "rough times" and that my mood had sunk to such depths that his concern was genuine. How to explain to him, as I have felt I should have to so many others, that not everything that I write is necessarily autobiographical. That as a poet, as a writer, I take as much or as little artistic license as I want. I change facts, I change names, I change minor details - a sunny day becomes a day of European rain. A brief exchange with a stranger, a woman, becomes an entire friendship that, at least poetically, is a sisterhood and a coming together and simpatico understanding among women. That said, much of what i write is also true, and that part, is for me to know. At least, that is my view. I leave it to the reader to sort through the debris.

To be clear, things are not always as they seem. Or at least, they enter the poet, travel through the pen and finally the tip and come out the other end translated, passed through a human conduit, and depending on the conduit, the particular writer, the story will differ. A good exercise to prove the point; take any two poets, give each six words that they must use in a poem and then ask them to write a poem at the same time. Their poems may be of any style, any length, and so on. The only rule, they must use all six words.

It is a revealing game and teaches us something of who we are. Rarely will two poets write with a similar theme or atmosphere, even though they use the same words. An alternate version of the game is to give each poet the first line, or simply a title and the same rules apply. You'll find the same results; differing points of view, a different story spun as it passes through each conduit before dripping from the end of our pen and onto our page.

Poetry will always be subjective. That is its beauty. There is no need for objective truth here, or Platonic Truth with a capital T. We are not bound by any rules, or even the need or requirement to be nice or fair or any of those things that we are told we are supposed to be in our world of "should" and "ought." So in this way, poetry seems to be a sort of rebellion against everything that society tells us we should be or do. Poetry, like anything if used properly, can indeed set you free. It can be a lethal weapon, a loving hand, it can stroke and slap at the same time, it can be contradictory, it can be truthful or entirely fictional, it can be autobiographical or theoretical or an amalgam of both. Poetry can be entirely what you want it to be and the poet is answerable to noone in this regard.