Based on a Prompt: Object and Location

You know, it's ironic
that you brought me up here.
This is the Great Wall of China
I am your phone.
You brought me up to something
that was designed to create a disconnect
between people
and
here I am
building a great wall between your face
and books --
Life is a funny thing
especially when you're just phoning it in.

You have hundreds of contacts
but barely remember the context
for acquiring their names.

You know,
just having someone's name attached to their photo and number
doesn't mean you know them.
I know your touch better than your last lover --
I know your likes better than your mother.

There might be an app for just about everything,
but I bet if we looked at your history,
we'd find more than the sites you've visited.
the comments you've posted --
I'm not saying you're more than you think;
I'm saying you're than a medium
for social media --
and you need more than face time or
Facebook.
The number of people who like you
doesn't make you more likable.

Saving the world
does not involve
posting selfies from famous places
or inspirational quotes on instagram.

Money is more a flushing toilet
than it is the settling of a sick stomach.

I'm sorry
that you're looking for moments to preserve
so that your followers will know you did something
over
finding stories worth preserving
or
dreams
worth following.

4/30 Based on a 10 minute free write

This is why gargoyles hate the cooing of pigeons

Shit
is so often preceded by cooing.
Birds
have no excuse to perch
because they
have wings.

But even
Pheidippides
is said to have died
after running 26.2 miles.
Sometimes
it's not the fact that we can fly
but that we're too tired to try
that seems so depressing.

Taking a break
is not an act of treason
against the light you've been given.

Asking for help
is not punishable by hemlock,
so stop acting like
you're going to die
if someone notices how tired you are.

Sometimes
the best way to get back on your feet
is to admit that you've fallen.

Sometimes, birds
get scared too.

A Surprise Treat Awaits You

I have been a little behind on the blog/poem posts... So today is a catch up day!
This piece is based off of a wonderful workshop where we wrote based on a Snapple Cap fact, a fortune cookie's fortune, and a tea packet's wisdom. This one came from a fortune cookie.
Note: This does deal with issues I have faced, and sometimes, yes, I do still feel sad/angry/depressed about it, but I believe it's better to write out your frustrations in order to help get rid of them. Catharsis is a wonderful thing.

A surprise treat awaits you --

I am a comfort zone zombie.
I am a specter of everything I currently understand.
I am a tombstone afraid to know its own inscription.

When your clinically depressed students tell you
that you need to stop looking so ghost
that your scarecrow stance is
making them weary of becoming an adult,
then you know
it might be time to listen
and stop telling yourself
that you're not worth your own wrist watch anymore.

I want to believe the fortune cookie's message;
I want to listen, but I've been scared to break bread
ever since diabetes claimed a piece of my identity at 10 --
dinner is a death row final meal;
breakfast is Socrates' punishment;
lunch is a poison,
and a savior.

Maybe I haven't been comfortable with Christianity
ever since I understood
that every diabetic blood test
is less sacrament
and more sacrilege to Jesus' promise --
my fingertips are lamb sacrifice --
I bleed to know how healthy I am;
my disease is a daily flirt with suicide
because knives that cut steak
are far too similar
to the knives that cut wrists;

weight that no one can see you carry
is the heaviest.

I'm trying --
I'm trying --
I'm trying to feel normal
to trying to touch tomorrow;
to let go of yesterday;
to move past
but moments can feel lead
and sometimes I don't feel strong enough
to lift this tombstone inscription
of everything I haven't become.

Snapple Fact Lolly Pop

"The lollipop was named after one of the
most famous Racehorses in the early 1900's, Lolly Pop..."

Type II diabetes has become an epidemic in America.
Maybe we've been betting
on the wrong horse
to win this graveyard race.
The body craves sugar because
in the early morning of humanity's childhood
before we domesticated animals,
before we plowsheered hunting into recreation,
before we buried gathering to reap crops from soil,
sugar was a lottery ticket.
And now we can find it on every street cornerstore --
we put the gross in grocery.
Our bodies
have not kept pace with our abundance.
Lollipops are winning this race
because we're such suckers
for everything that's easy.
Every birthday comes with cake,
but we have to be careful
with having our cake and eating it too
because if we're not careful,
birthday cake could become necrotic tissue,
could become retinopathy,
could become hear disease, nerve damage, stroke,
and these are only some of the side effects of diabetes.
Killing ourselves
has never been so sweet.

_________________________________________________________________________________

This poem is not finished yet. It was based on a wonderful workshop that came from kind of a joke: Buy a snapple... read the fact... That fact becomes your first line... And write.

I'll write SOMETHING happy... sometime... I promise. Today was just heavy. And I needed to expel some of the lead through my pencil scratches.

Thanks for reading!

Elegy in E Harmonic Minor

In 1880, Tchaikovsky composed the Overture of 1812.
It is a composition made famous
by the fact that it uses canon fire to act as instrumentation.
It's played every July 4th here in America,
but if you listen closely
you can hear canon fire covers
in distant deserts;
you can hear sons turn their bodies into crescendos;
cast their xylophone bones into a chorus of shattered silence.
The Middle East may not know western music,
but that's only because they only hear its dissonance
never its resolution
because an accord reached at the end of World War II
diminished holy land held by Palestine
and augmented land exiled from
into a land returned to.

If bodies are temples,
then every suicide bomb bent
on spreading holy organ chords
is just another form of graffiti
that tags blood over open doorways
to tell those around:
Pass over this place.

The trouble with holy land
is that it's only holy
because so many martyrs have buried their beat underneath it.

And somewhere a Palestine father prays
that his son will never elegy himself into an explosion.
Somewhere, a Palestine mother prays
that he child will grow instrument limbs,
that her child will have A sharp lungs and B flat feet
so that hate can't conscript him into its sepulcher.

And somewhere in America, a politician prays that the public
won't listen long enough to remember
that it was we who swung these scales in the first place;
it was we who thought democracy
would sing the right key.

We are not the correct composers
because we still think that the Overture of 1812
with its explosive instrumentation
commemorates us.

It doesn't.

That overture found its voice in 1880
to celebrate a Russian victory,
and that's ironic because the CIA taught a battle hymn of hatred
to Afghanistan when Russia invaded 100 years later.
That hymn still echoes with IEDs rather than canons.

The trouble with never having war on home soil
is we don't have a reason to cease
because we've never had to reap
crops sewn by the flesh of the dead.

We haven't had to hear dissonance's dirge,
and the only coverage our soldiers get
is flags covering their coffins.

I don't know
when our anthem became
the sound of a nation collectively covering its ears,
but there are still measures left.

This song isn't over.

And I don't want anyone
to fear their son becoming
an explosion.


This piece is based off a quote I heard on NPR spoken by a Palestinian man:
"I don't want my son to become a suicide bomber.
I want my son to live.
I want my son to become a musician."

Pain is Water

A few days ago, I participated in a jam night with blues music as its focus. I very much like blues music. I very much like jamming. I did not very much like this night's jam as a participant. Perhaps because my ego got involved or perhaps because the musicians were more annoyed than inspired. I got hurt. I was not happy with the way I felt.

No one made me feel these things. I felt them. I'm not confident enough in my own emotional control to say that I chose to feel the feelings.

The world is a reaction.

Everyone is a microcosm of the world. I can either turn the butterfly wing flap of their words into hurricanes of anger, or I can west wind them over plain states in order to turn turbines and make a change through the charge I was given. After all, turning wind into the way you're reading this post is the new transmutation, ins't it?

Pain is water. We are plants. Too much pain, and we can drown. Too little and we can become anemic. Just enough and we can grow.

Pain allows us an opportunity to grow so long as the pain we've felt is looked at as something that can help us pinpoint our difficulties and take steps to fix them.

This is where poetry steps in.

The Prompt:

Think of a memory that has a lot of pain associated with it. (Sometimes the farther back in time this memory is, the better.)

Let it all out - every negative thing you felt, put that down on paper and let that stuff go.

Now, think of what actions this experience led you into taking.
Who are you now that you've survived the pain?
Who might you have been without it?

As for the jam I talked about earlier. I realized that my knowledge on blues chords is severely lacking. I can comprehend what a 7add13 chord is, but I have no idea how to fret one on a guitar. For this reason, I'm going to learn a lot more about how to play those chords. And I'll try my best not to be upset that I don't know as much as I'd like to.

Epiphanies Seldom Happen When We Expect Them

Tonight, a student told me, "The real question you have to ask yourself is 'Why do you have a lower opinion of yourself than everyone else around you does?'"

 I don't know. But it got me thinking.

What assumptions do I make about myself? What assumptions do I assume other people make of me?

Try:
Think of a time when you assumed the worst. What crazy chain of events would have led to the world's destruction from that event? Then: How did the situation actually turn out?

OR

Write a list of your craziest fears (no matter how absurd)! It's a great list poem format!

Not Enough Hours.

Sometimes the phrase "I wish there were more hours in a day" feels more like a vodka soaked plea than a wish.

Still, I wish there were more hours in a day.

I guess 24 will have to do for now.

If you could have a conversation with your former self, what would you say? Do you think you'd listen? Which version of yourself do you think would learn more?

Tragedy Is So Easy

This is another topic that's been on my brain for a bit now.

Tragedy is so easy. Don't get me wrong. Surviving tragedy is not easy. But we, as a society, have manufactured a different idea of what "tragedy" is.

I present to you the following phrase: "First world problems."

The coffee you ordered was too hot/not hot enough.
Your unofficial parking spot was taken by someone.
You're having a bad hair day.

I think one of the biggest problems with American culture recently has been our refusal to qualify things. I think part of this is a reaction to a small subset of people who are so focused on the semantics of something that it feels futile to qualify your thoughts. When people get shot down, they tend to not want to fly. When the emotion we're trying to describe is met with "I don't think that's what you really mean," then we stop trying to describe. We stop trying to separate out the big from the large. And there becomes an agreed upon understanding that certain words are going to stand for much, much more than they were meant for.

Interesting, awesome, cool, hot, great, good, wonderful, amazing... these are quickly becoming nonsense words. Their meaning is lost because they are overused. They begin to blend together into some amorphous mass. If our culture were a person, they'd be repeating these words until they lost all meaning.

Tragedy, in some respects, is like this. Tragedy is becoming a catch-all. Tragedy is not a catch-all. Tragedy is not simplistic. Emotions are not simplistic, but I digress.

Tragedy is easy to apply to ourselves and others because we use it so much. Tragedy is easy to relate to because it's begun to lose its meaning. Tragedy is becoming misery. And we all know how misery feels about company.

It's too easy to talk about our tragedies.

And it's tragically difficult to talk about our successes or to compliment others for theirs.

Part of the reason I'm embarking on this journey is to clear my head of some of these thoughts. And, hopefully, somewhere along the way, remind myself that it's not all tragic. And that it is okay to be happy and to tell others how great they are.

It's also okay to tell myself that I'm pretty baller.

So, with that last thought in mind:

Write a list of all the stuff you're good at.

Once you've done that, try writing a piece about how one of those items is your super power. Imagine a world in which its continued existence relies on that power.

Now go save the world.

Perception

Okay, okay. It's March. Some might think that this is just a reminder that time is inexorably marching on towards "oblivion" or something equally as depressing. Sure. I mean, you could also look at oxygen as one of the most corrosive forces on earth as opposed to, say, the stuff that you need to be able to admire all of the other corrosive things on earth.

Really, it's all about perception.

Now, I'm not saying that looking at the world and imagining that it is full of butterflies (Yep, butterflies, everywhere!) will suddenly make an earthquake shake into the product of a billion butterflies flapping their wings at once... but that is a pretty awesome image... No. What I'm saying is that the way we view the world has serious implications on how we feel about it.

And how we feel about ourselves.

If you think that everyone is out to get you; that they're keeping you in whatever hell hole you've been trying to claw your way out of, then just keep in mind that "YOU" necessarily falls into that whole "EVERYONE" category.

Ever wonder why you hate Bill in accounting for being so damn lazy? Well, my friends, you're probably Projecting your own laziness on poor Bill. In other words, the things we dislike about other people are usually much more informative on our own crappy habits than they are honest assessments of the other's character. I'm not saying that Bill isn't lazy; I'm just saying you dislike Bill because you hate your own laziness. It's just that it's easier to dislike someone who isn't us first.

This is probably the greatest and most humbling lesson another individual can teach us.

Anyhow, back to perception.

The point of talking about Bill from accounting was to point out that humans very often do not have objective ideas about reality. We are stuck with our animal instinct perception of everything. Granted, you can train yourself out of this way of thinking by focusing on Mindfulness and Awareness (two good reasons to do Yoga, Kung Fu, or Meditation), but most people suck at being mindfully aware (self included - but I'm working on it). Ahh, but this brings us right back to Perception.

The world is a vast and expansive place. The oceans still hold mysteries. This place is pretty damn cool. If you view the people around you as miserable bone bags who just haven't woken up to the fact that this place called life is a Ronda Rousey fight (short, brutish, and ending in all your limbs being broken), then your view is essentially right. And painful.

However, if you view the people around you as trying their best and who just need a little help every so often and you view yourself as both student and teacher... Well, then you're right too.

I can view all the painful crap that happened to me as reminders as to why life sucks, or I can view all those as reminders that I wouldn't know the brightness of the light without seeing how bitter the dark is.

So, what do we do with this? Simple answer: write poetry.

It's not cold outside; it's the world reminding us to hold someone close.
I'm not sleeping; I'm rewarding myself for getting crap done.
I'm not crying; I'm offering up a salary of tears like a tithe.

The prompt for today:
Think of something from a minor annoyance to a big frustration and redefine it using a metaphor. What implications does that have for the rest of the world? For all the things around it? What changes must be made for this metaphor to stay true?

This can work to varying degrees with tragedy, too but that's a topic for another day.

Remember, perception is one of the poet's most important tools.

Untitled... Because that's not cliche

Listen. Or don't. But if you don't listen to the words, then maybe the voice in your head is broken. I can't fix that. I'm still trying to fix myself.

I decided that I need help. Not in an existential, the world is falling sort of way, but in a very real, "Sometimes I don't know how to deal with this" sort of way.

I am a performance poet, so I'm used to giving the audience a piece of who I am. Every performance, however, is just that. It's a performance. The stage is hyperbole. We inflate ourselves in order to stand tall and walk with bravado unbecoming our normally small stances. We deflate ourselves to seem small enough to be relate-able. But this is a monologue. No one ever asks the sun if it gets tired of shining.

I haven't asked myself if I'm okay in a long time. Maybe because I didn't want to give the answer a voice. It's easy to ignore something when you can't hear it. It's easy to pretend things aren't broken when you don't get them checked. Sorry, I just turned this into a stage again. Too much hyperbole in that last sentence.

I'm not broken. I'm just not sure where the pieces quite fit anymore. I still haven't come to terms with being diagnosed with diabetes. 18 years later, I should be warning my childhood about the dangers of smoking since its legal now. But I've been refusing to admit there's a fire.

Anyhow, I'm still hyperbolizing. I like the idea of being able to change the shape of my problems. Maybe, if I can blow them up, I can work them in reverse too. It's just a pity that my problem fits so well inside of me that I sometimes forget the difference.

I decided to ask for help. My endocrinologist, a doctor that works with the hormonal systems and, more specifically, with diabetics, gave me the number to a counselor who works with diabetics. Truth is a scary thing to let free.

It shouldn't be.

If you need help, talk to someone.

They say that the universe listens when you make requests. Every atom in our bodies was once inside a star somewhere. How lucky are we to have ears made of stardust? The universe is closer than you might think. Maybe that's why stars twinkle like eyes; why constellations are drawn in your palms; why your smile reminds me so much of the sunrise...

Why you think the wind whispers your name. It does.

Step one to recovery is being aware that there is a problem.

Step two starts today.