Slam Poem

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This week my students had a poetry slam and I participated. This is the poem I shared/performed with them titled “Nerd.”

When I was a kid I won a medal
For reading two hundred books in the third grade
Cool, right?
You see, back when we were wild eyed children
peering at the grass and searching through it
to see if it held secrets, and rummaging
through cabinets trying to find a hidden
door to a secret world, only to find that box
of pop-tarts mom put high up so we wouldn’t
gorge ourselves on sugar,
well, being a nerd was alright.

Then something changed—
suddenly it was uncool to read and
in middle school I was meant to spend time
practicing N’Sync dance moves.
My friends would say that books made me look
like a geek and nobody wants to be friends
with a geek. Turns out I needed new friends,
because really I was led in a terrible direction
when they prompted me to tie my hair in
a fake-haired scrunchy,roll my shirt up
to expose my tummy, and put on
3 inch foam Spice Girls platforms.
I was 5’7 in the 7th grade and I looked ridiculous.

So in high school I decided to hang out in a different click,
because everyone has clicks in high school even if
they don’t like to admit, and I was deemed a punk and a nerd-
which was fine because I was no longer the “geeky giant”
with a man-shoulders and weird Next-Gen t-shirt that
I wore at least once a week—although it still made appearances.

Now I get called a nerd at least five times a week,
which is okay, because I am.
But I also see it being used to put kids down,
like it’s something terrible—a visible scar,
but it’s not an insult that could be hurled
or at least it shouldn’t be.

I’ve come to terms with what it means to be a nerd.
My nerdiness connects me to the world and
to something larger and less self-serving
than just myself. It connects me
to ideas and feelings and wonder
about where our world is going
and also where it has been
To me, being a nerd means I take time
to investigate the world around me
and that I form relationships
with others who also question
and think critically,
and most importantly have curiosity
about anything.

You see, being a nerd is never an insult,
but a point of pride and self-love
and I will go on being a nerd
because like bowties,
nerds are cool.

So take some time to pull those glazed over eyes
from the glare of a screen and examine what it means
to be a human being.
You see, I think it is a human strength that we
cannot fully understand our own existence.
In hundreds of years of good and bad guesses
music that pulls that heartstrings, literature that seeks
to define love and grief, as if it is possible, we have yet
to come up with a ‘right’ answer or an encyclopedia entry
on the perfect and purest form of humanity.
It is our vast complexity and trek for discovery
that really keep us going.

The minute we have all the answers—
solve every equation, predict every outcome,
analyze every emotion and idiosyncrasy
or worse, the minute we don’t care to seek,
is the minute humanity ceases to be unique.

So you don’t have to be a nerd about sci-fi or books,
You don’t even have to be a nerd about anything “nerdy”
but be a nerd about something–engage it,
because once you believe you have all the answers
life ceases to interest you—time
becomes a constraint sent to bind you
in infinite boredom, but you are bored
not because you have all the answers,
you are bored because you have ceased to look.

I may be a Trekkie and still aim for 200 books a year,
but that is simply what I chose to love.
That is simply how I discover and chart my world.
Pursue wonder and never stop searching
for that something that makes you passionate
and makes you feel something.
Because at the heart, being a nerd is not about what you love
but it is about the way you love it.

Chart Your Soul

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When I was young I liked escaping.
I took up a pen and set out to discover what
I was so mad about and it worked in jumbled,
scribbled, and thankfully illegible pages of a journal.
To this day I write to discover and to chart my soul
and I think I’ve figured something out—although it is
a work in progress, as all things are and should always be.

You see, I think it is a human strength that we
cannot fully understand our own existence,
grasp our own motives, and know our own emotions.
It is our vast complexity and trek for discovery
that really keep us going.

It is our infinite weakness and confusion
that keep things interesting—a contradiction,
I know, but our obsession is with the quest
and not with the reward we claim to seek.
Knowledge is power, but wonder and intrigue
stem from its discovery and its journey.

Our lives would be empty if every map thought up—
the mountains of our inner thoughts, the plains
of a smile and a frown, the seas fraught with
kind eyes and cruel words churning erratically
because the tide is unknown…

When there remains nothing to chart,
every bookcase full, every
computer chip stored up with our so-called
omnipotence, we will slowly start to wilt
and fold in on ourselves; a flower quietly
closing it’s petals and saying goodbye to the day.
The swoop of a shut door and the silence behind it.

Once you believe you have all the answers
life ceases to interest you—time
becomes a constraint sent to bind you
in infinite boredom, but you are bored
not because you have all the answers,
but because you have ceased to look.

And to stop looking is to stop living
So do not allow the compass to stay
or your pen to still, because you,
You are the cartographer of your own life
and you have the tools to chart it,
Never stop charting your own soul
or trying to understand the souls of others.

“Year of Magical Thinking”

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Joan called it her year of magical thinking
and I cannot help but be anything
but captivated by her words, so true
in their applications.

I still seem to muddle through
not noticing the illogical holes in my view
of what happened, and where you’ve gone
as if you are anything but.

I get stuck on the details, even ones
that I can’t remember clearly, they’ve gone
from view and I am motionless
in thought.

It has been a year, my year
of magical thought and I fear
that it will go on somewhat longer
than simply one year.

It seems these thoughts have been put off
and I struggle to place them in any logical
context of time and space.
Instead they float, elusive as I have made them
waiting, patiently, to be addressed.

A Thought Continued

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I was recently upset by the Gun Control initiative recently died in the Senate. I remembered the poem I wrote previously about my fear of guns and how strongly I dislike them. I decided to write a continuation of that thought and wrote past the first three stanzas of this poem. It works well as slam poetry, but I think it also translates on paper. This is not a condemnation of other viewpoints, but an expansion of my own.

Shooting Games

Somebody asked if I would like to shoot a gun
just for sport, a hobby out in the woods,
I froze.

I could barely muster up a No,
torn between feeling as though it were silly
to feel so antagonistic
but still the feeling in my stomach argued
with logic and I couldn’t bring myself to hold it
the cold barrel, heavy and metallic
and easily deadly, in my cold hands.
I could not imagine the feeling of power
and suffering and far too often
contained in something so small and toy like.

So I collected my words, uncomfortable,
waiting at the depth of my mouth, but stirring
in the pit of my heart and very calmly and politely said
“No, thank you. I’d rather not.”

You see, guns to me are not a sport,
but a family tragedy
where there is only a memory
of imagined gore
and unimagined fear.
An empty bench,
and a premature goodbye.

You see this week a gun control law failed,
and flailed in the arms of the senate
begging for the smallest of cautions
met with great resistance
and I can only cringe and ask
isn’t it worth the tiniest of measures
if just one time a shot
is stopped.

You see, this to me is not a great roadblock,
or even a steeping block to something bigger
but an almost meaningless precaution
taken to ease the pain of those of us
who have lost at the hands of those
wielding guns—see I am not naïve enough
to blame the gun, but I can blame it’s
overwhelming presence, and think
that maybe that small allowance
would give me small comfort when I think
of my father.

Because some days I sleep peacefully and restfully
without waking in a sweat, without seeing violence
under my eyelids, without cringing at images,
once indifferent but now unsettling.

Some days things are alright, but other days
I hold back the frenzy, like a shadow it follows me
sewn to my toes and mockingly dancing with pain
as it pokes at the back of my neck trying to get a rise.

No, I am not naïve enough to believe
that it’s the fault of the gun—I am all too aware
that the fault lies with the man holding it
thinking about ending life, isolated by
hatred, self-doubt, or unjustified motive.
I see a gun in the hands of someone giving up
on life and taking it by force
never mistaking a deadly weapon for
a water-filled harmless action.

So until then I will kindly decline to hold a gun,
something toy like and tragic in one
so often sold and easily bought and politely say
“No thank you, I’d rather not.”

It’s Allergy Time

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Please pardon my lack of coffee cups, for it seems I have not been getting Starbucks for the three bucks out of pocket.

Being Ill

Sometimes getting out of bed
is like fighting Caesar’s army
when my nose is the Hoover Damn
and my ears filled with cotton
the head aching with anvil weight
pressing in full force on my temple’s gate.

Whoa is me, I dare say
when sickness strikes on holiday
work seems such a frightening fate
too far away and too rigorous to make
me rise from my goose-downed tomb
a curse much like exiting the womb

and yet I persist to put on pants
and a shirt in a rather clumsy dance
from horizontal to vertical is quite the task
as I make it to the chair and desk
and back to bed for it is far too much
and life is short and unjust and plain rough.

I think I will go back to bed
to hibernate allergy season to its grave
perhaps I shall wake when my stomach growls
and calls for me to fill it’s empty pit
but then that, I think, is asking quite a lot
from yours truly, Miss Allergy Fraught.

Inaugural Address

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Today is history
in the making, I saw
eons of hate and injustice and judgment
and pain wrapped in a cage–
still banging wildly on the bars
but locked and tightly knit
with hope.

Hanging on the words of a man
hoisted by desire for change
despite voices calling for a fall
and a nation holding its breath
in the storm of what is to come
and the wreckage of what has been
our story.

For so long–shrinking pockets
and a war waged from fear and
inequality for people like me and
people different from me but
in ways so slight and immeasurable
when it comes to life and
the news ringing with gunfire
every night at eight.

Today I teared up listening
as a nation came together
and whispered a prayer of hope.

Coffee Cup Poem no.84

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Shooting Games

Somebody asked if I would like to shoot a gunccp84
just for sport, a hobby out in the woods,
I froze.

I could barely muster up a No,
torn between feeling as though it were silly
to feel so antagonistic
but still the feeling in my stomach argued
with logic and I couldn’t bring myself to hold it
the cold barrel, heavy and metallic
and easily deadly, in my cold white hands.
I could not imagine the feeling of power
and suffering and far too often
contained in something so small and toy like.

So I collected my words, uncomfortable,
waiting at the depth of my mouth, but stirring
in the pit of my heart and very calmly and politely said
“No, thank you. I’d rather not.”

Coffee Cup Poem no.83

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On the radio I hear
cries of war, a distant
story of the gory results
of a bomb, far away,
and close in the speakers
of my car. I learn
of pots and pans
and water, still simmering,
on the stove. A family gathered
around for dinner,
a scene now eerily compressed
in radio waves.

The family’s clean house
now painted with dust and
fallen chunks of construction,
mixed with plasma echoes
in the reporter’s voice
over chatter of the clean up crew
shaking in a home, strangely quite,
I imagine. And still. How still
it must be now, life has gone,
and the only movement is
that water on the stove.

The bombs keep falling and
stories keep coming over
air waves and televisions.
The world is slowly quieting
as all over water boils over,
turns ichor and thick
and the stove is left burning.

Coffee Cup Poem no.82

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Some days I feel lucky,
floating, almost, and I
forget to feel all those things
that plague me on the other days
When I feel lost, and I
turn to the thing–that person–
that makes me feel the luckiest
and all is confusion–blurred–
those days, lucky and lost,
lucky or lost, are the best
and make the most sense.
The other days are days of nothing
and nothing, as everyone knows,
or whoever has had love or loss
(as sayings wisely go)
is the worst feeling, or absence of
because there is no point to nothing.
No gain, no loss to be for
there is no be in nothing days
just the absenteeism of is
or there or were or was or here.
In nothing only blackness is found
maybe not even that for
nothing is simply nothing, and if
you’ve ever known it, you know
this to be true, no whole in hole.
Those are the days I live to avoid
and dodge if I can–for if I live
in days filled with anything but
nothing, then there is always something
something to be lucky or even to be lost.

*This poem is intended to have a different format, but for some reason unknown to me, wordpress refuses to allow me to indent lines.