(This writing is a result of a unpleasant mid-afternoon poetry reading at the mansion of a wealthy patron of the arts. As a part of a Poetry Workshop, with other writers, I agreed to perform. The response for my work was less than gratifying. I was left at the end of the day, discussing the NBA with the black limo drivers.
You,
praising the replicas
of dead poets...
pretentious manuals of style.
dazzling impressions
of ancient jewelery,
withered daffodils of prose.
me
facing the pale-eyed, impersonal looks of
writers trapped in
the taste of art patrons.
poets doing ***-kissing
for tenure, a position,
a grant,
a slot on the
arts commission.
Look,
I am not Robert Frost.
not iambic pentameter,
not sonnets,
not Encyclopedia Brittanica,
not a English bard,
not a half-deity
from Ancient Greece.
I spit fire,
sounds leaping
from the throat
you once tried to choke.
Incorrect, unrestrained
misbehavin,
my words the electric fence
blockin your path
to the streets.
my hair too wooly
for your tea-time fame,
your mid-afternoon readings.
I am the disenfranchised brute
univited,
crashing the banquet table.
My verbals, too pungent
for your dungeon
of society-faries,
poet-star ******s,
art-world whores.
I wont be
the token negro intoxicant
to soothe your white guilt,
granting you access to heaven.
I am not balanced meters.
not matching stanzas,
not quatrains,
not second-person pronouns,
not traditional,
not classic or Romantic,
not a footnote.
I am poetry.
Free and unadorned
As the eastern skies.