I stroke a brand new page
and wonder if rage or
plight or a flight out of this age will
overtake these white spaces between
blue lines,
wonder if I’ve anything meaningful to tell, like
what I think about politics
or **** hips or chapped lips in this winter’s wrath.
I’m on this path, you see, to try
and gain a different perspective,
to learn a different language,
to try and send a message
instead of doing the usual clichés about love and death and
cleaning up an alcoholic mess and
everyone we know has aids but
we like *** and
we hate each other’s different colors and
pretend to be emotional,
you’ve heard this line before:
cry or bleed tears or blood through words or ink onto pages or..
what.ever.
I’m guilty, too, of course, it’s true:
the one who points it out is guilty most,
but now I’m tired of being boring,
tired of not telling a story,
let’s… try… this:
my name is: michal.
I am:
white
twenty one
female
bisexual
jewish
a traveller
open parentheses : a stranger (close parentheses)
I am:
Sitting in a room full of black Africans
in Africa
a stranger, young and white and
interested, and suddenly, it strikes me:
c o m f o r t a b l e .
sitting in a room full of bl-
no.
we are human beings being taught to see in colors and in genders
being taught to judge a person
by the accent by the nation by the actions of the past five minutes by the plan for the next three by the chemicals or plants he puts into his body but what about
personality?
I am:
sitting in a room full of:
POETS.
or people who want to hear poetry,
and though on the outside I’m so…
white – no, different, on the inside I’m so…
warm, feels right, so not
distant. for instance:
you get what it is to let words string themselves on your necklace
and choke you till you’re
breathless
and make you beg for more, you’re masochistic
like me, like that, you
get what it is to close your eyes
and let each others’ words overtake you
like going under a wave in the Indian Ocean
like being swept into the eye of a tornado
like hiding under three blankets in the dead of winter
like turning the engine off but keeping the battery on and parking with dad in the front to let Pink Floyd finish playing Wish You Were Here before we move to open the car door,
you get what it’s like
to open a blank page and let the pen use your fingers in ways you never knew
lingered through the smoke of the incense in your brain,
the drops of the tap of the thoughts
your mind thought it turned off,
those last few breaths you never knew existed,
exist in your head,
exhausted,
I am:
walking out of this segregated room and into the next part
of this interesting test where I find
brainwashed white folks brainwashing my mind and instantly
I’m watching every black guy that walks by
‘cause this is the most dangerous city in the world
and those coloreds and those blacks
commit all the crimes so lock the door and close the windows and
watch your back and clutch your bag tight even in the
daytime and do a double take a triple take and never
talk to strangers you never know who’s a neighbour or
who’s checkin’ out his next
victim ‘cause he’s been
evicted out of society’s boundaries,
out of the space God made for good people,
fair people, people like us who know how to watch out.
Wait! something smells
funny, not really funny:
sad. we must be mad
to buy into this it’s making us
crazy and angry and when was the last time you
smiled?
I am:
smiling, thinking about that last time,
I was in a room full of poets and there was
magic happening and we were
black and we were
white and we were
re(a)d all over, we were
blue with ink stains on our fingers, we were
pink with our vision of life, we were
yellow ‘cause the sun was paintin’ us bright, permanently
green from the grass on our
denim, brown from the earth that rooted our spirits back to our cores,
orange from the flames of our words,
purple like the royalty that shined
from our souls, we were:
rainbows,
black and white are just multitudes of rainbows, after all,
simply shades like the ones we use to cover our windows
out of fear of the next break-in, just
shades, just
shadows, remnants of painful pasts
that we must avoid in our bright & colourful futures –
if we let them be so.
let me catch my breath, I haven’t
been so out of it since that
lunar eclipse that lit up the galaxies,
let me catch
my
breath,
my
death,
my breath, my goodness catch
me now before I trip on your
hiccups before I slip on your
scattered makeup before I slip on your
shallow skirts and dresses,
catch me before I choke on your
grey flavourless cooking before i
regress to the levels of stress
that lead to all our health
deterioration our self-poisoning
medication catch me so I die with a pen in my hand,
righteous and trying to deliver
an emotional message of
love, of coexistence,
I forgot to mention I am:
Israeli,
plagued by hatred in another story,
by violence unnecessary like
painting over to hide the rotten parts,
like pain in modern art,
let’s just lie here together
add a little cliché, underneath the stars,
close your eyes,
feel the dark,
hear our breaths move the air
and start a steady chain reaction,
a journey towards a butterfly effect
(how powerful the breath is!)
let’s call this art.