Night of Poetry at The Merc Speaks to Wide Array of Human Experience

Poetry, especially slam poetry, is a coercion of language and a careful choice of diction used to articulate events of life which carry immense loads of emotional implications with them. They can also seek to bring to light simple and often overlooked realities. In the next piece, I tried to highlight a few different experiences which most people go through which may be large events or everyday occurrences in order to show how they fit together.
 
My name is ______. I drift through the halls of my life glancing out of the windows from time to time. My glances breed guilt for they are quick and greedy. The things I see, they are things I could have, they are things I’ve had. Out one window a boy lays in the sun on a green shag carpet as alive as the sparrow cutting swaths through the air above him. His heart is smiling the smile of an infant who senses a moment of truth in your handicapped expression of love.

We don’t love. We smile and wave afraid that expression of true emotion will reveal the truth about our status as damaged goods. If that status is known then we have revealed the status of our perceived callousness as a façade.

All shields down.

A thousand times I have passed this window and glanced quickly out and moved, even more quickly, on to my life in stride. My denial of truth. But today the sun rose, I know because I watched it, and I stand and gaze at this boy on the lawn and I feel my heartbeat. Pulse pulse stop.

I move on to a new window to see what else I have been rushing past. My heart drops in sync with the same boy from the last scene who now stands emotionally bled out in front of a girl who has stripped him until there was nothing left through her gilded promises and clever rhetoric. He blindly committed his heart through closed eyes at first kiss. He learned about emptiness as her blank eyes passed over him in the street while her bloody hand laced its way into another, not his. Tears are the sutures for his heart and I feel a need for them for my own as I look on. My heart goes off again but I feel the beating from a different area. Beat beat beat beat beat….done.

I don’t want to go on anymore. When emotion is exhausted one questions God. My feet halfheartedly try to return to stride and my left side becomes illuminated as if the new light through this new window dictates which appendages of mine exist in the recently pitch colored void of my life. There is my friend again. A new piece of him is visible in his strength. His mark of Cain plays testament to the periodical firing of his clay heart. I see these times in his life and they give me back my heart. Like a sonata each of these moments are keys and leaving out a key is leaving a masterpiece undone. He has pulled me out of my shell with his rhetoric and like the smile on a young child’s face he has shown me unadulterated beauty.

For the first time in a long time, I feel my whole heart. With open eyes I look out the window, climb through and join life.