A Mind, Lively and at Ease

This is a draft of a slam I’m working on. It definitely needs tweaking, but so far so good.

Papa loaned out his life for choice.
The draft loomed over heads, burning
papers, scratchy voices from screaming
down at police, swallowing cotton,
leaving the only home you knew
for the border which had
the only life you could’ve willed.
November third. Who knew your birth could
predict your death? He still had his head.
Went out there prepared to be led
straight to jail. You were handcuffed
either way as long as you couldn’t pay.
The lottery spun heads over tails,
a gamble entered without
putting anything down, without feeling the rush of a
chance at luck besides a longer wait.
The radio sang out the dates with a low tank
of gas, monotonous machine voices calling out
death row, speakers straight from Auschwitz,
government straight from big businesses and
their need to spread a regime that would increase
profits tenfold, gather laborers as shepherds gold,
killing the spares… the future… with a heavy hand
that rolled the lists into cigarette paper for the burning.
They, yearning, a drug infested cargo, dirty with
hopelessness and humanity, fired on
their imaginations, their futures, their trust in themselves—
the surety of justice and evil, those bad people.
Papa loaned out his body and soul to the makers,
the puppeteers, the land takers, the directors, whoring out
his only worth to the only option dear America,
in all of their dreams and mirages of a perfect
consumer happiness, left for the son of a
seamstress and a grocery store owner.
Dear lord, not present anymore to his shadowed
hoard of sons, let explosions be sunlight
and shells his seeds of democracy,
planted in the soiled skin of unknown enemies.
November third. The radio relayed a number
less than it should be, anticipated by
each long legged, weedy young male to be seen—
a sapling of a man grown solely
to be sown,
and sold.
November Third. At that point he heard
the fates cry out their judgment through
the long finger Uncle Sam pointed straight
through his body and into the wild,
leaving the pre-destination as a half-concealed decision
whether to wait for the inevitable boots
and burl to strip him into raw materials for shipment
or willingly walk forward, unfazed, holding together
duty and pride, saving face, sacrificing plans
all in the good faith that life could be worse
so that at least within the destined course
he’d find suitable work
and one day return to home and family.
November third. Shucked from a husk,
life in the hours of dusk, Vietnam, Viet Cong,
Viet Minh, words from the television’s lust
to present to the public the tragedies their
ill-fortuned offspring faced because of
a government’s wasteless foreign policies,
sunken in shit up to their elbows, guns raised high
above heads, the seeds planted and grown
in bloody corpses of children and childrens’ parents.
Men. Thrashing in their sleep. Gathering everything they
could keep, in order to later throw it away with their
sanity.
Men. Drowning in the deep waters of a country
they’d never seen, an enemy they never uncovered,
a reason never explained.
Papa loaned out his life for choice,
enlisted that day,
walked into the fray,
and never received any gathered interest.

Performed some slam poetry in front of the class today. Although I had some problems with going too fast and the beginning being a bit too abstract to really drive home the point, it went over well! I had some great feedback from my classmates, and they seemed to relate to the concept. 

Which has me thinking, I must be on the right track. I’ve never gotten that much support from an audience with any other form of expression. Plus, when I perform, I feel this overwhelming sense of relief and a gut reaction that expands and cuts into my senses. It feels right.

Anyway, as I’m learning, it seems that we tend to favor one form or another, even tend to specialize in it far different from the others.

What are your favorites? Do you ever feel like it just “happens” and you wind focusing in on the words to a point that you never achieve with the other types of writing or expressions?

Perhaps mellow isn’t what we want. Maybe cool is just an afterthought. Can it be so simple? Only after the dire do we tame the fire. As the cinders become ashes, we hush into a calm silence. So cool. So chill. A pulse beating before that is now still. Isn’t there calm after the storm, as the winds fade and the clouds dissipate, the ruins lay before us—clumps of soldered metal twisted and bent, things once upright now curled into themselves as a cornered child, bumps and humps of unrecognizable infrastructure, and every resource scattered, wasted and spent. Faces dry as crumbling wells. Cool, man. Numb. Dull. 

When they first found out, their heads almost dropped off of their bodies onto the floor. Crying, so much crying. Who was crying? Who wasn’t crying? The world was a wavy mess, hiding behind the great and enormously overwhelming truth. She was gone. It was over. No one really knew. She was right there, I swear. I saw her leave to use the restroom. How did she get back? 

Mom and Pop grabbed their stomachs, grabbed each other’s shoulders; Mom wailed into Pop’s red shirt, making dark stains drip down his chest like pools of blood. It was a little after three o’clock in the morning. Pop’s hand had clasped the phone, fumbling and unknowing what signal lay beneath its antennae, what the waves would reveal, the dark shadow of thought and truth that would erupt and disrupt their little precarious ecosystem into a frenzy layer of choking air and shaking ground. The dimensions would turn, digging into themselves and distorting any perception of reality they previously believed. A phone call, a disembodied voice, a medium of acute pain and an emptiness never to be filled woke them from slumber. 

The kids, that was what they were really, saw her too late. Time had taken her to the sweet depths. In a way, she looked like she was skimming along trying to reach whatever was hidden behind the concrete and crust, curious and ever patient to learn the rugged texture’s secrets. The kids sputtered and spat, screaming babes. Her nostrils had filled with the sharp water, swallowing and inhaling all at once into one great movement, a moment, of bursting with no release except downward. A few emptied their stomachs in the bushes, tasting the bile that earlier directed their thoughts and actions: the bile that ended her short life in a perfect blue-green wasteland of chlorine and sweat. One look at her gently flowing hair, as if stroked by her own waves of momentum and spirit, sent each kid hurtling to the pale, rough ground. Screams. 

A phone, small but large in duty, placed the call to dispatch. No one remembers who hit dial. Their lives spun, a vortex with her glowing corpse at the center. 

 A shell of a body, encased gunpowder, and small to boot. She’d paint the couch if she could. She’d paint it red, along with the floor. Any piece of softness would become a blaze of thick, layered red textured with crumbling edges and a glaze of dark shadows—making everything look wet. That’s how it should be. She would make the walls white, bright in their dullness and its impolite glare of empty space. She’d curl up into a corner, and wait. Just wait. Wait until the sun stops rising in the East. Wait until her toes become pruney with age. Wait until her mouth made up for the mistakes with forever silence. Just wait.

It didn’t last long. His hands were cold. Her stomach was boiling, like she only ate Taco Bell for weeks. Her thighs strained, and all she could do was watch the ceiling. It was mottled, spiked, weaving with bumps that became the faces of everyone she loved and everyone she trusted. Shadows of faces. His hands were on her waist, groping. Thunder grabbed her pelvis and shook. Everyone she loved, everyone she trusted. Her eyes rolled back into her lids, heavy and with a childlike consciousness of an autistic little girl. Large hands, foreign hands, the palms of a lie. She couldn’t tell where they didn’t cover her. The ceiling weighed down into her vision, growing and receding.

It was over. They weren’t there. She didn’t see everyone she loved, everyone she trusted. It was just a ceiling, only a limit, only a barrier to where her little sparrow body couldn’t fly past. He was just a body. He was just a body. She was just a shell. Her eyes were glassy, very slowly rolling around—seeing only the abstract waste of her mind in shock. Some part of her knew. Where was the rest? It was consumed in her own black void, a defense mechanism. Erase it said. Erase.

It’s blank now. She’s gone home. She’s run back through gray cells to the core, grabbing synapses with her. It felt good to have control. She was happy in a way, glad to determine what went and what stayed. It was a pathway to home, a hermitage of her own. They were all gone. She’d wait.