Go to a Poetry Slam.

A prose poem.

Go to a poetry slam.

 

There you will find an empty seat waiting for you and a friend, if you so wish. Hell, bring your family, your co-workers, your children. Sit and listen together, so that you all can discuss it later and convince each other that yes, it really did happen, and that no, it wasn't a dream. And if there are no seats available, stand"but stand where you can still see the poets.

 

Because an event like this isn't just about the words or the voices or the rhythms. Let them look you in the face as they open their mouths on stage in front of a room full of strangers and lay out their secrets in front of you like a flush of hearts on the poker table, but without the bluffing...they tell it like it is. And who wouldn't want to hear honesty for a change? Honesty for change, ha, as if poets get paid to preach the truth about praying for change, for better days, for a better life ahead. They speak for the love of the beat and bounce of letters humming in their throats and rolling off their tongues.

 

But freestyle don't come free. Maybe you'll hear from a girl who is missing her mother in grief, wishing it was her mother who had missed when holding the gun to her temple. Maybe you'll hear from the father who hasn't been able to find a “real job” in over a year, who's forced to pay child support but only sees his children once a month. Or maybe from the public school English teacher of a boy who has no male figure to look up to and asks, “Why do we read this old stuff anyway?” and of the response this teacher gives him: that the same power that beheld Socrates and Aristotle and Plato is inside himself and that Mount Olympus is right in front of him, waiting to be climbed. Or from White Girl who falls in love with Black Boy when everyone around her tells her that “We don't do that stuff 'round here” and that White Girl should love White Boy and have little white babies in a little white housewith a little white fence"all in a time in which people say racism is dead.

 

Listen to the group of women who stand before you and inform you about the laws legislators are trying to pass in silence and without the blows of the media, the laws of which try to simplify rape as if it needs redefining and would make it harder for victims to get abortions. Watch the tears that build up in the man throwing his hands in the air from the bottom of this economic abyss as he tells you poetry is the only thing keeping him balanced in a world that is constantly shaking the ground beneath him. Feel the words in your ears and let them sink into your stomach, filling your chest with nouns and verbs like a flood of ink and blood and tears.

 

See the artist that paints the picture before you with the courage and creativity most do not have the will or power to display before your eyes. Maybe once you have heard the truth, you will face the lies, because you will then understand that one is an art and the other a scam. So if you want to learn how to change the world, go to a poetry slam.

 

And listen.