what if thoughts turn into poetry

What if one thought slips away, and another takes its place? Like a shadow overtaking the light, shifting without warning, almost invisible in its arrival. I wonder sometimes if I even catch these transitions, or if they settle somewhere deep inside, like layers of sediment, one thought buried beneath the next. Can I trace where it all began, or does it matter?

There are thoughts I keep hidden, even from myself, carefully tucked away like pages in an old book no one opens. I wonder if they know I’m afraid to face them, if they understand that their weight is too much to carry in daylight. Maybe they know, and maybe they wait patiently, resurfacing when the time feels right. Or maybe they trickle out in words, slowly bleeding onto the page in fragments I barely understand.

Why do I hide them? Perhaps it’s fear, or perhaps they’re too raw, too revealing, exposing layers I’m not ready to show the world—or even myself. There’s a quiet comfort in their hiddenness, a quiet rebellion against the pressure to always know, always confront, always explain. These thoughts can be like ghosts—gentle, lingering, waiting for their moment to speak.

And somehow, they always find their way into poetry. They slip through the cracks, dressing themselves in metaphors, hiding within the rhythm and the lines, surfacing in ways I don’t fully understand until the words are on the page. Poetry becomes their disguise, and I let them take that form because it’s safe. In poetry, they’re less direct, cloaked in images that speak without revealing too much.

So I write, letting the hidden parts emerge—not as confessions but as echoes. The words come as if they’ve always been there, as if they’ve waited for me to release them in a language that feels close enough to truth without the sharpness of full exposure.

Is that what poetry is, in the end? The place where hidden thoughts breathe, where one thought turns into another, shifting and evolving until it lands, shaped but not caged, raw but somehow gentler. And perhaps that’s why I write—because in the lines of a poem, those hidden thoughts can live freely, beautifully, without the weight of judgment.