I’m giving up poetry. At least that’s what I think; I don’t know if it’s what I mean.
I’ve been at this place, time and time again, and I always regress, back to my notebook where everything seems to hold less stress.
Poetry is who I choose to be.
It’s not what I do it’s who I am.
So yeah, I don’t know half of the shit the workshop instructor said.
Who the fuck is Charles Bukowski?
Let’s just say this is all new to me. I don’t research my craft, I just put pen to paper and it happens,
maybe it’s a natural born talent,
it’s not like anyone ever tried to help me.
The knowledge everyone else has, doesn’t make me,
poetry flows through my veins it is me.
Today they desire those who know about modern poets, and their work.
But when they need a Pablo Neruda expert they’ll regret sending me away.
When Edgar Allan Poe needs a tell-tale heart, that’s when they’ll remember my name.
Langston Hughes had a dream deferred, but little did he know it was passed on to me.
I know nothing about sestinas and soliloquys but the day you need a metaphor or simile lean on me
because no one knows how to put an off base rhyme together like I do.
No one knows how to push out excruciating pain thru pencil tips like I could.
No one knows that me and poetry go way back.
Back to the womb of my mother,
back to the race between me and the other billion sperm cells.
We go back,
back to the lost memory of my sight, the first breaths of my cry.
We go back,
to elementary when my teacher asked me to write.
She told me to write anything I wanted.
And in my fist I gripped that pencil and in the funny squiggles that were still unfamiliar to me,
I wrote, “If you met your heart what would you ask it?”
And I keep meeting my heart and breaking it.
Keep hearing my shadow scream at me you’ll never make it.
But I am it,
so fuck the name Bukowski.
Bring back Silverstein and Frost.
Because these people of which you speak I know not of.
My limited knowledge does not make me, it shapes me.
Yes, I’m a ragged edge and you must take care around me
but no one can claim that my heads not in this game, because I have my soul in it.
I sit at home and watch YouTube videos about it.
I close my eyes and dream about it,
I am that unheard brave new voice.
Def. poetry jam is what animates me then it tears me down as I read the bios.
They know so much more than I could ever catch up to.
I don’t need that much to let my words be heard, and touch the endless skies miles from me.
I know nothing of what they teach but I still go to learn.
And I dare someone to say I’m not about it, I’ll show them what it is.
I’ll lay my words onto storm clouds and let each word fall in the shape of rain.
I’ll turn every gunshot into a story, I’ll make my project building be the stage and me the narrator.
No one’s ever told me I was born for something greater, only something slightly better than where I am now.
My head was never filled with you could be president or anything like that. In fact, my writing is supposed to lead me
nowhere.
I don’t think anyone sees that this isn’t something I do, it does me,
it enters my body penetrating every inch of me,
no it doesn’t fuck me, we make love to each other,
I don’t chase it, it chases me. Around every corner, in dark alleys, on park benches, sandy beaches by the water, it follows me.
It doesn’t belong to me I belong to it and it cares for me.
Poetry invaded me, and I gave myself to it completely.
Every tear I never shed ties me to it,
every secret I never said ties me to it,
every scar on my body ties ME to it.
We’re entangled on paper sheets, slammed on spray painted walls, even the floors are marked up.
It knows me, and embraces me, the wind that whips around my short hair, it whispers, you need no other knowledge than you just love me.
Am I giving up poetry?
It’s impossible to give up something that lives in me, it controls my limbs, my mind even the gestures I make with my hands.
It’s fused in my fingertips, enforces the open and closing of my hand.
I have been in love with poetry since the race for humanity began;
It will always be a part of who I am.
A Poem a Day 