Call me a poet, baby! Tell me I live in the
rush of
adrenaline zinging out into the
visceral dark, sticky
metanode of
human experience. Tell me I live in a state of
consciousness where
verb fingernails race up my
spine; each
noun tastes like a hard
clitoris and lingering on a useful
prepositional phrase is almost a good as
giving head.
I’ll drink any
liquor you’ve got:
Langston Hughes,
Gwendolyn Brooks,
Dorothy Parker,
William Blake,
beer,
champagne,
Chardonnay,
Maker’s Mark Whiskey.
Slap some good
dick jokes on my ears. And I’m back atcha with
dead baby jokes.
Poets are real people even if most of the time they identify more with
The Velveteen Rabbit. Maybe after we’ve been
coarse, rough,
twisted and vaguely
pornographic, I’ll tell you all about the series of dead baby
poems I’m writing in celebration of each of my
abortions. Maybe I'll be
vulnerable...ready to risk. Maybe I’ll just wander off to a street corner somewhere, so I can
rant and
vent about
politics until the
police come to take me away. Or do the same thing – minus the police - at a
poetry slam. Every encounter with an
animal of the same
species has a
vortex of
potential outcomes -
it's the little things that matter. Let me be a poet so I can:
slap men on the ass and have them think it’s charming;
pick up cute boys at poetry readings;
have people assume everything I say is true and happened to me,
revel in being misunderstood;
brood, celebrate, and weep in the space of 60 seconds;
scribble lines, rhymes, metaphors on match book covers, cocktail napkins, ATM receipts;
think masturbation is a human condition worthy of at least a haiku.
Call me a poet, baby, so I can think about thinking about making a difference, articulate a kinder vision of the world, try to understand people who are not like me and feel compassion. Call me a human being who speaks the unspeakable with pen and tongue – and if I were a poet, I wouldn’t be crazy.