Last night,
Just after the horizon snuffed out the sun,
I raised a fort in my room
With sheets stripped from the bed,
Strewn across standing lamps
And tucked behind an old armoire;
One that’s been rubbed raw
By more hands than a rosary
And could tell you any kind of story
If you just listen closely.
And it’s within this Stronghold,
Guarded by Phalanx of G.I. Joes and
Little, plastic, green army men,
Past the “No Girls Allowed Sign”,
That I worked away on my own personal
Manhattan Project.
I Built a Box
With windows, sealed,
A pad-lock on an old worn door
And nothing more than a hole in the floor.
Then I hung it with decrepit strings and lucid wings
Thrown together using what
little shards of innocence I could find
Sporadically strewn around the room.
I climbed to hang my box from heaven,
Perhaps, perch it on a silver cloud,
The ones you hear so much about,
And use the gold that laced the place to build a gate,
A gilded gate to block out all hate from my estate.
But Heaven seemed to be afraid and must have fled
Because all I found were stars…
Stars that, disappointingly, didn't seem to shine as bright as they did when I was a kid…
Stars with rotted holes.
"Stars, shouldn't have rotted holes" I was told long ago
By a man who molded my thoughts back when colors still seemed vivid.
But ironically, I used them to hang what remains of my childhood in a juvenile fashion,
Glancing back and forth searching for a set suspicious eyes
And developing pre-conceived alibis just in case to my surprise someone
Happened to catch me in my moment of immaturity.
I waited in my Box, my serenity in the sky,
My shelter from the outside lies that can hypnotize
Until a mind's wiped blank, a "clean slate"
In which they carve their "rights",
And their "rules",
And their "Laws" using tools constructed by Machines
That know nothing more than edacity and greed,
That know nothing more than the taste of oil,
And exactly how cold steel can feel when
Grid-locked between two gears and a wheel.
So we kneel to this submissive hold
Of chain-linked fingers
That keep us encased when
We're told that Logic and Probability is all we need to know
To make decisions and grow
Now we can grow in any direction
That our branches are clipped,
Like a bonsai tree.
So believe me, I can grow
but grow to what exactly,
A mechanical humanity?
Now see, that just wont work for me
Because, sometimes, I like to dream
That I’m superman.
So I turned an x-ray eye to a box the sky
My star-riding, gravity defying
Fortress of Solitude,
And it’s here that I'm safe,
Because the only hole to a corrupt world is the one I drilled right through the floor.
The one I peer through at the placid crescent right below me,
In hopes to find a feline running hand-in-hand with a spoon
Or to catch the cow that leaps over the moon,
Or maybe even see the Lunar Man, himself, crack a smile
Anything to dismiss my denial of Fairy Tales
And fling me back to that youthful state of mind
In which my mind would state that anything is possible.
Because the world we live in now tells us that Chapter Book Heroes are Obsolete,
That we should just yield to defeat
And that it takes a hell of a lot less than Kryptonite to meet our demise.
We just know that Nine-to-Five is the time it takes a glaze fade over the passion that lies within our eyes.
If I could just find anything to justify that true love isn't merely a cliché,
That innocence and limitless capabilities of the mind
Doesn't whither away with age,
And that "Happily Ever After"
Is so much more than fading ink on a worn out, final page.
This is one of the first slam poems I wrote
C.Voss (2006)