Month: August 2017

I am angry.
I am angry that as an American I know that even the vilest of ideas must be allowed to be expressed.
I am angry that as a Christian I know that I am supposed to love my neighbors and pray for them, even the vile white supremacists and their orange leader with the small hands.
I am angry because I know that responding with violence to small penis, goose stepping, white supremacists will solve nothing but I still desire to treat them exactly as they want to treat others.
I am angry with the enablers, those who through their silence or deflection are as much of the problem as the goose stepping assholes.
I am angry with myself as well because I know that I have done nothing in my life to significantly combat this cancerous ideology in my city, state, or country.

This morning I was thinking about spoken word poetry as a vehicle to get my book selling and this is where my brain ended up going.

We all have a rhythm, a beat that undergirds our lives, it flows within us and draws us along. But expressing yourself outwards is different, you have to tap into the rhythms that others are drawn along by, to pull them into your words. Oh, do not get me wrong using your own rhythm can be effective to a larger audience if it is similar or compatible, however, if it is too far away the discord will be too much to handle and you will gain nothing but a cult following.

Consider music, the rules that drive chord progressions and such tend to have a lot of carryover from genre to genre. Much of the difference besides the content, instruments, etc. can be found in the differing tonal ranges, bass heavy music as opposed to more melodic pieces. What you can start to notice if you pay attention to these type of things is common chord progressions and tempos across diverse genres, most especially in “popular” music. A good way to hear these differences, play an album by a one hit wonder, compare the hit song to the rest of the album and you may find that the rest is just not as “catchy” or appealing.

Poetry and writing, in general, have the same types of rules. Just as a story follows rules of beginning, middle, and end there has to be a rhythm or cadence for the written words to flow off of the page for the average reader to enjoy. If the language is discordant and uncomfortable to read, then part of the brain will spend too much time stumbling over even simple language trying to rewrite it so that it is comprehensible.

Now this, of course, does not ignore that there are groups of individuals who are outliers and will be more in tune with discordant rhythms that most other people will find too uncomfortable. In fact, I propose that if one was to simply consider the vast universe it is clear that diversity, order, and chaos are requirements of any system and the discordant groups are as natural and orderly as those in harmony with each other. The moon is the cult following of the earth, comets are cult followings of some force within the cosmos, planets are the mainstream followers of the suns, on and on.

So, it all boils down to where one wants to be in the cosmic scope. A sun or cosmic dust? Is your rhythm appealing and consistent?

Despite having caught a glimpse into the workings of the universe, I still have no idea how to get into spoken word poetry and have instead produced a discordant path of ideas that leave me desiring the eloquence to weave them into something more.

All around the words of prophets
rise up in the world,
mist in the mornings.

Console cowboys riding,
Baron Samedi plays his puppet
on the stage of the world.

The blind stand firm
confident in their beliefs,
dancing with the puppet.

Orwell laughs in his grave
and still, the question lingers
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I hit these spells where I just do not want to write. I feel like all I am going to do is rehash something I have already said, that there is nothing new for me to express. So I avoid writing or thinking about writing, which makes it worse because when you try not to think about something is usually when you can not stop thinking about it. Almost like a bug bite, the harder you try not to scratch the more it itches. Now I want to write and my hands are hurting and swollen to the point it is painful to write. Just makes me want to laugh.