I'm glad there's poetry, and I liked this.

But I want to ask a question: this is not rhymed, and it's not metered (unless I'm missing it). What, precisely, makes this poetry?

Here's an experiment: read the following.

~~

I keep bumping into stuff with the giant question mark floating over my head. What do birds think of other birds' songs? Is it too late for planet earth?

"You'd better not go outside," says my wife, "you could get snagged by a passing truck's rearview mirror and drug to your death."

Huh. My closest experience with death, other than looking at my father turning into water who probably couldn't see me either without his glasses, was not remembering my life-saving operation. In fact, I don't remember two days up to it so that's five days gone counting post-op, five days consumed by darkness. No firm handshake from an admired also dead writer, no certificate or gateway of consoling light. One of the occupational hazards of writing poems is thinking about death too much like you can't get the red or yellow to stand out without a thick black outline. The first thing I do remember is the breathing tube yanked and my wife patting my hand, her lower lip stuck out the way it does when she cries. I felt like a newborn giraffe that plummets six feet to the ground from the birth canal.

~~

There. Is it still poetry? Is "free verse" just, "write a couple paragraphs and chop them up /artfully/"? What makes this different than that? Seriously, I'm asking - including the author, if he's reading this. I want to know - I've always wanted to know - what makes free verse anything beyond artfully and/or pretentiously chopped up prose. And, if the answer is "nothing", then what am I missing about it (and why is it a separate art form)?

(Answers which rely on a graduate-level knowledge or understanding of poetry are self-refuting.)