slam poetry

Gedichte des Donnerstags! Here's "Amet", the second poem I did at the last slam. Enjoy. If you have questions about references, feel free to ask.

Creativity
Is not the same as creation.

Man
Is not the same as existence.

Every second I form new life
As the skin on my hands is shuffled
By cards to table
As I shuffle card
To card to hand
To play,
To make my own luck.
I can make my own skin.

I can build houses with muscles and sweat
I can build muscles with weights
And with words I can turn sweat
Into a panting exhilarating
Experience.

But I am not a poet
No, I am a creator

I write poems by leaving bit-wise impressions
Between the pores on my skin
So that you can run your hand up my arm
And feel the truth of existence underneath your fingertips
In binary.
I let the feeling of goosebumps like braille
Dictate the form
And the meter is as long as the page itself:
Sleeves of prose poetry,
Interrupted by the non sequiturs of veins and armhair
There's a six and a half foot poem burned the length
Of my body that contains the necessary
Rules to live this God,
And I scrawled the word truth
In Hebrew on my forehead
So that I could bring myself to life.

On my thigh,
Tattooed in magnet so that you can only read it
With a laser shining light,
Is 17 lines of iambic pentameter.
When you trace them around it spins and skips
like an old Sony walkman cd player,
Because ever since they were spoken in act 2 scene 2 it has been true:
Yo boy Hamlet had it right when he said

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

And yet and then act 5.

You see,
The A side gets all the good tracks
And this one lasted for seven days.
And the B side of every album is
Always shorter.

These hands that built buildings
Can just as easily tear them down.
Cards can be undealt and reshuffled and luck can be lost
On purpose

And I will beat bricks with hammers
I will call out in prayer to Gallow's God
And let faith guide my slander,
I will let the Declaration be the rag to my match and bottle
And I will drown the first folio under dirt.
I will stumble through sand looking for mirages in grottos
And when I finally find that something that never existed
I will demand of the Earth
What is this quintescence of dust?

And when everything I've had
is unhad
When everything I've valued
is dereferenced
When everything I preached
is forgotten
Then I will raise a smile well met
And a muddied hand
Will dust away the aleph.