IV

Slam Poem for Creative Writing Reunion

 

What is the weight of a word?

One word, four letters, p-o-e-t.

Oh, you’re all rolling your eyes.

Not that poetry thing again. It’s okay. I know.

I know people who have promised me that poetry is inferior to prose.

Have promised to show me the errors of my ways,

That this love affair with line and verse and stanza

Is short-lived.

I know the story. I know about how line breaks are arbitrary,

But logic is the father of all virtues.

I know.

I know about how Campbell’s heroic cycles speaks to psyche more then any amount

Of alliteration or repetition or rhyme or controlling metaphor or even that saint of poetic form, Iambic pentameter.

I know.

I know I can’t make you remember a poem.

Not even if I stand here and scream a poem to you.

Because I am not what you would call a poet.

I am an upper middle class white girl.

What is this tragedy?

Tragic to be without tragedy.

You’ve never be oppressed why the hell should we listen to you?

And I could protest.

Oh, I could protest

Because I’m female, and we still only 70 cents to the dollar

And I’m bisexual, and pagan, and I have a prescription bottle in my bathroom cabinet for a little green pill we call Prozac.

But, then again, the oldest glass ceiling in education, Harvard’s presidency, just got broken

And who isn’t bisexual these days, and oh, the tragedy of being mistaken for Sabrina or even Harry Potter. And, haven’t you heard, every second person in America today is clinically depressed?

So. We’re back to where we started, with me, an upper middle class white girl, writing poetry.

I’ll let you in a secret.

I’m not just writing poetry, I am writing and I am reading and consuming and creating and imagining and I am living, breathing poetry.

We are all the authors of our own lives.

And you are writing sentences that turn into paragraphs that turn into pages that into chapters while I am channeling Emily Dickenson and scribbling lines that don’t quite rhyme into margins of notebooks.

You are just finishing the chapter titled ‘High School’, and you will turn the page and start on chapter 4, or 5, or 10, or however you’ve divided it, and it will be titled, cleanly, in Times New Roman, ‘College”.

This section is titled i.v., roman numerals baby, because poetry is based in antiquity.

I start with “the moon is following”

And this image has nothing to do with high school or summer or college, it has everything to do with the feeling of my mother breathing down my neck

“the moon is following

me as I climb attic stairs”

It has line breaks the way my life breaks, random naps in the middle of drama, mundane classes and tasks in the middle of the extraordinary.

You being with the character description, of the color eyes and color hair and the foreshadowing symbolic significance of everything they wear.

My poems have no protagonists.

I’ve never been the hero of my own life.

So my poems, they have no clothing, no faces.

I’d love to be a poem instead of a poet, never seen, just heard.

What use are faces in a world of abuses?

I’d rather not be a billboard for scars and bruises.

Because this is a face you forget overnight

I am not the girl you call up, the girl you come home to, not even the girl you think about five, ten, fifteen years later at the reunion just to wonder why she didn’t show up, if she got knocked up or if all that stuff she got into finally broke her down.
I am not going to ask for this face to take up space in even one neurological synapse.

I am poet, not a beauty queen, not even a homecoming queen.

Always heard, never seen.

Which is my reasoning for my life to be a poem

I’m not interested in all the descriptions and the dialogue and the “subtle indicators of the passage of time”

I’m not interesting in plot or reading comprehension quizzes

I want something I can slam out hard and fast

Something that isn’t personal, that doesn’t last.

I want was is necessary what is real and raw and wrapped up beautifully in a metaphor that never, ever states what is going on.

None of us have any idea of what is going on.

We are stumbling through this world with five imperfect senses.

And that is why I believe in poetry.

What is the wait of a word?

18 years. 18 years I have been waiting for this revelation, and here it is:

I am an upper middle class white girl with a tragedy you will never respect or understand but I am still a goddamn poet!