The sounds of Poetry

It's a beaten horse, but poetry is like a butterfly, or some other delicate animal. It's beautiful to look at, an awe-inspiring piece of nature that really makes the entire world seem as if it drinks from the same fountain of existence. But they when you try and figure out why it is beautiful, look really closely at it, examine it from all sides, you end up with butterfly parts strewn across the floor, a dirty microscope lens, and a dead animal, which is significantly less pretty that it was before you examined it.

Such, my friends, is poetry. I'm reading a book called "The Sounds of Poetry", 129 glorious pages of describing the nuts and bolts of poetry: why some of it works, why some doesn't, what rhyme can mean, etc, etc. Supposedly it will help my understanding of poetry and help me APPRECIATE poetry more. So after about 16 pages of another chapter of the book I had to put it down for fear i would never want to read another poem again.

To follow up on the butterfly example.

A child: "Look at the butterfly! It's so pretty!"
A person after reading "Sounds of Poetry"-esque book except replace poetry with butterflies: "Look, there's a Lepidoptera flapping its wings at a rate of 40 beats per minute gliding southward to migrate because the weather up north is too cold for the larva to exceed their minimum weight requirements for hatching!"

And by that time the thing is gone already.

And, by the way, butterflies are extremely scary close up. As is poetry, eh?

This idea that everything has a meaning, i sincerely doubt it, especially in the field of literature. Yes, of course, there is some in certain cases, but for some reason academics feel the need to dress everything up with meaning to look smart, or something.

So while I look at all the little things that I might not be happy with in my life and try to find out WHY they are happening and if i can change them, I'm falling into that trap. Isn't it enough that I can breathe?

It must be, because before there was college or girls with pretty faces and glasses or reading or grades or anything, people must have had some reason to not just throw themselves to a wolley mammoth and be eaten.

What are the alternatives to existing? I guess its too late for me not to exist, but whatever is the opposite of existence is, it can't be that bad, because nobody's ever come back from doing it.