Preaching At The Choir [guest poet]

Unconcerned with mood or tone,
they speak in monosyllabic tongues,
iambic and spondaic lines running together
like a mismatched three-legged race
where everyone falls down. Ideas
like multifaceted, variegated, intricate,
are hard to rhyme. Obtuse and awkward,
those are left out of the glorified speech–
not to be held within the text, nor used to describe it–
replaced instead by bold smells and beer, boys and their
baseball gloves… a ceaseless onslaught of alliteration.
By the fourth line they’ve broken the fourth wall, screaming
into the microphone, shoving the nifty little internal slide
between “men” and “oppression” down the listeners’ throats.
Subtly is cast aside for redundancy– their bodies are theirs, after all,
an inalienable right that can’t be taken away. It’s bad to call
girls “bitches.” Eyes angry, hair
tossing, they arrive at this powerful conclusion, only to drift
out of “I verb” and into “all little girls.” Breathless and heady,
they spill the final stanza from their heart, their guts,
onto the stage and into the ears of people who watch
slam poetry.

written by a friend