Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

I have been eating poetry.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing,
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.