Let Me Throw This At You

My voice

calls out to you from this stage.

My voice

raises itself like a dragon rearing its head

and it falls 

it falls like the world trade center,

casting rubble out in waves

millions of paper

millions of annotations

of margins

of love notes

and millions of voices

crushed

but not silenced

voices smothered and beaten to a pulp

yet still they rise.

From the dust, from the ashes,

from the millions of love notes

my voices come through

like smoke

and they suffocate me

and they choke me

and they cloud my view

but I keep talking and pushing my words out 

tearing, and crying out,

animalistic

like a woman in labor

pushing and groaning and losing control

and pushing some more

until something new is born.

and this something is the embodiment of a new passion

this is new life and it has new life

it is shriveled, purple potential,

growing, stretching, scraping its knee, climbing trees into

a potential of energy

through scarred arms and stolen hair dye

to become potential of power

and beyond that to a power in its own right.

This voice is my right.

It is my right to project and thrust this

voice out

to meet its destiny

though it be shaking 

though it spends its nights alone

though rocks scape against it

paring it down,

sharpening its switchblade

slicing through this and that, person and opinion

the molten vocal chords of my throat

spewing across this crowd and burning you too,

burying you in your own ideas

burying you like Vesuvius buried Pompeii,

buried in ideas only to be discovered 

a thousand

maybe ten thousand years in the future

if hence the future still exists,

and all of this, I find, 

is still in my head.

and I found myself screaming at the top of my voice “i can’t do this. . . 

anymore”

an you said “you were never doing it. you have to start, you can still start - your life depends on it-, even now, especially now, because you are here and you are now and most of all you are.” 

you are you are you are. 

I am. 

[This is my first attempt at slam poetry.  I might post an audio presentation of it at some point.]