up and down, but you

Sometimes,
I’ll sit for two, four, more
minutes, or hours,
or even days,
waiting for a reboot
for the computer,
but more for me,
powering down then up, up,
up in the sky, look! 
it’s almost all cultural
inspiration, at that point, 
memories of superman 
(see above) or 
Gilligan’s Island, sort of
stranded, sort of not,
but mostly memories of 
you, reader, if you are 
who I think you are, 
when we first, second, 
rounding-for-home met,
connected like ball meets bat,
or I think that’s too sharp,
more like badminton racquet
meets shuttlecock, (c’mon, really?)
where I’m shot to the sky,
my feathers trailing back,
my brain concussed with 
the power it takes 
to deflect fate, 
and eventually, 
for which sometimes I’ll wait,
gravity’s slow, sure pull
snap back to reality,
whoops, there goes
my train of thought, 
and look, the cursor
is blinking, and you,
(insert your name here)
are worth so much more
to me than poetry
might say, 
no matter
how long I wait, 
no matter
what game we play,
no matter
what power we give
to fate. 

---

Something has changed within me. Something is not the same.

I have found that writing poetry while picturing speaking the poem out loud, has given me insight to themes and techniques that I haven’t used before.

Here is my second example of a spoken word poem. The first is here.

I intend at some point to post these poems to social media, FB and YouTube, perhaps to IG and TikTok, though I don’t know if they are too long for those.

Regardless, I’ll post them here first. Get whatever feedback you might offer, and then I’ll work on posting elsewhere.

This video is in black and white, which I think works better with this site, and overall, even outside this site.

It falls in line with my aesthetic here. And it sharpens without whatever color filters affecting the true color of my video. Being colorblind, I am lost with any color editing.

As for the poem, I had fifteen minutes or so this morning and put myself in the mode I enter as I write with the expectation of speaking the poem myself.

This mode is different. If you went through my archives you’d see a difference especially with how I address my audience. Perhaps you’d notice what I notice, that these lines are ready to be spoken.

I went back through my poems (as I prepare for my book, which I hope to release near the end of November) and read them out loud.

I found that I just couldn’t find the right voice. I watched some YouTube videos and didn’t think I could pull that off.

Here I actually know my audience. I’ve written the poem speaking to one person, thinking about that reader, trying to hear the poem the way they might hear it.

I’ve also got lines that feel meta (is that the right word?), where I’m processing the poem that I’m reading as if that line or lines weren’t already in the poem.

The biggest example here is my aside (“C’mon, really?) to the line “racquet and shuttlecock” where I step away from the poem to chide the reader, assuming that the word “shuttlecock” might distract them.

I might think this because I was a middle school teacher for twenty-two years. I know the words that trigger them and this once certainly would.

I like how the baseball imagery came out, though I didn’t quite nail the line “rounding-for-home” and decided that six takes was enough.

I also like my allusions to the Superman line, the Gilligan’s Island reference, and the Eminem line that I let trail off.

And I think that the last word hits well, rhyming with words just said, “fate” having a punch all by itself but here it is allowed to echo, to resonate.

But as much as this poem works as a spoken word poem, I think it also stands by itself on the page. Reading it out loud lets me offer one interpretation of the poem, but I think there are more ways that it might be heard.

And here’s the poem as an image, the way, I think, it works the best: