cubistpoet

Layered Voices

A voice in the back of my heads says
that no amount of crotch-grabbing,
no amount of staged sexual innuendo
no amount of pelvic thrust
no amount of fuckity fucking up my poem
will make me harmonize smoothly
with the slam chorus.

Its like a bunch of Greeks
in tragic masks are pointing fingers
singing operatic stanzas in four-four time
about the dying screams of the American dream
lyrically butchering all the sources of their suffering,
and then in pipes the b-flat of my baritone where there shouldve been a c.

That voice in the back of my head says,
What do you know about pain?
What do you know about suffering?
What do you know about broken homes, hate crimes, and disconnected phones?
You wouldnt last a week if you were forced on the street.
What the fuck are you going to write about?
Quit your whining about that girl youre always pining for.
About how American consumerism leaves you distraught
as youre buying a new color TV at Wal-Mart.
Come back to slam when your dodging the draft of another Vietnam.

And I cant dispute his arguments.
I cant deny my white, semi-spoiled, only child hypocritical life.
I cant deny my lack of anger, my lack of spite, my lack of reasons and whys
to take the stage in a fit of screams and shouts and tears.

And so I made fun of some for their reoccurring rhythms.
And you just dont know how many I made fun of for their repetitions.
But I couldnt help feeling guilty for reducing myself to such mockeries.
Who was I to judge a slam poet willing to stand up for what he or she believes?

And then I realized all my parody
was just a manifest of that insecurity
installed via power saw and rubber cement into the back of my head
by some crafty engineers at Sears working for that voice now saying,
Pay no attention to the man behind the screw gun.

After that first epiphany,
more just started rolling right into me
flaring up the temper of my skin like
sunbeams on a low-ozone midsummers day.
It was that voice thats been making my papers
shake in my hands on stage worse than any earthquakes
making me stutter and stumble
making me rattle and rumble
cracking the mike, cracking the floor, cracking the door, cracking the world.

Its that voice thats been making me second guess
which poems are safe to read
which poems wont make the audience hiss, boo, and plead
for me to end my sadistic exercise in aural torture.

Its that voice thats been making me think that
just because my thoughts and words arent the norm
I need to bandwagon up my form
and storm on the stage in a fit of pantomimic emotion.

I reached back to rip that voice from my skull,
but I realized he was leeched to my spinal cord,
read-only access,
no remove function in sight.

Hed dug his talons too deep,
been calling the shots too long
for me to just decide to send him along.

But I kept my microscope zoomed at max on his back,
I had to search for a way to dislodged my unwanted lodger
because if mathematics is the language of the world
then poetry is the language of the soul
and my soul cant stand the lonely nights locked up
inside the hourglass walls of time,
sand slowly filling up its lungs,
waiting to die.

So my voice be damned I will find
a place for my surrealistic slanted rhymes
even if it meant undressing all the internal organs
and machinery of what it means for me to be a slam poet on stage
and engaging in emergency triple by-pass open-heart surgery
to clear the clogs of stagnation and quicken the flow of deliberation
amongst these modern-day troubadours gathering their stories
in this therapeutic amphitheater rally round the campfire competition.

And now Im beginning to realize that the only voice
that has no place on this stage is the one in the back of my head.