Are people poetry?

Are they perfect lines and perfect rhymes, and stanzas with worlds in them?

Do they stand so still as to pierce your heart tied nicely in a ribbon and bow?

Are they legible, intelligible, and easy to fit in a box? Can they flutter from note to note in song unsung?

Are they all of the above because they are only half words and more the way the silence after the stanza makes us feel?

I have heard it said that we should not call people poetry because people are not perfect. But is it what is in the lines of poetry that is itself perfect or does it seem perfect because it is written in poetry? How dare we say that "his eyes are gray" when they are filled with the pensive droplets of rain from the highest mountain peak, the freshest of water from the tears of clouds? Why is the steam from my coffee not a nod to the mystical dragon's breath if it allows me to see that my words can burn nations? Why is her hair not filled with the magic endowed to the flowers that allows them to spring from the earth in blatant defiance of gravity for beauty and perseverance's sake?

The raw interactions of the depth of the world guide our hands to manifest themselves in new forms that give new eyes to the way the poet sees and feels. How dare we belittle the most beautiful words of poetry strung together as beads on a necklace by calling them, "floral", "extravagant", and "pretentious" when they make us cry and smile and yell and keep going?

Poetry is but pieces that do not complete, nor balance, nor accentuate us, but rather they are the evidence of completion, balance, and accented reality because poetry is not created out of nothing. It is created from life and death and anything that we can see that we wish others to see too.

Oscar Wilde was right when he said that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life. The rain makes music on your window-sill, the shapes and colors in that photograph remind you of that day years ago, that film quote encapsulated something that means deeply to you.

What does it say about us that we cannot easily draw the line between art and life? Poetry is the simple bones of a greater idea as humanity is. Humanity, ever caught between being called artistry and a work of scientific genius that we have yet to comprehend, is the closest to poetry of all for its profundity, simplicity, and versatility.

Poetry is not perfection, however, we make it so with the fragmented pieces created by the way the bleeding of our wildest dreams slip into reality as mortar in a brick wall. People and poetry are stitched together with similes and metaphors, complexities and simplicities, the amalgamation of the blurring of life and art because they are not perfect.