A poem is good for understanding one’s own thoughts. A poem is mostly structured around breaking down a long stream of narrative and creating an experience from it. It plays with timing and rhythm and that becomes the tone itself. This can be considered similar to how their thoughts can occur. When one is thinking, sometimes there are several thoughts that will interact with each other in a sporadic matter leading to a sound conclusion or understanding; much like how a poems lines all interact with each other to identifying a feeling using a particular context or story within the poem. Even the way that poems are read from time to time resemble the way the mind can think of simultaneous things all at once. Perhaps a poem is not essential to surviving in that way but I think the way it is able to connect with you as the reader without it necessarily being about something you have personally experienced acts as an internal dialogue. In that way poetry becomes a way to practice processing thoughts and can allow the reader to cope with whatever problem they see projected on the poem.