This is not a slam poem that is not to say
My stanzas slumber or stumble half-drunk
Into the brickstone or the bookstore
I am no ivory tower
I am not the edge of glass
Yet sharpen silver tongue to knifepoint
My greatest legend is unwinding book spines
Bulldozing merriam webster unabridged
dictionaries i don’t know whether to
Fashion mortar or mask
Let me return as comet dust let my bones be ground
So fine the night clubbers and necromancers
Get high off this powder let particles crystallize
In cigarette ash unlit or perhaps the artifact
Of too many good times my grandfather
Loved them too and rechristened his
Mistress leukemia how would he react if he
Knew his granddaughter struck the match
To see if her skin would molt and emerge
Phoenix whether warble or war cry
A symphony begins with a single note
My legend is 40 year old smoker hacking
My legend is fighting tooth and bone i will stretch Out the same hand
That lights the menorah that fumbles with the match
That paper cuts and buries the living with a eulogy
Wrenched between my teeth but i’d rather bruise
My forehead than bleed from clamping my tongue shut
But i don’t want to be remembered as a martyr
Like my mother and her mother and her mother
My legend is of sunbeams who took suitors
They braided roses into tourniquets the reason
They never lacked power they were just waiting for an amplifier
My legend is gutturals and glottals
I used to get paper cuts every time i performed
Because i thought my tongue was made of marble
Like the rust would spare the artists
My legend neither particle nor wave
Transcends the tenor of a tired truth
I ebb and flow but the current can’t set
The precedent for the prophet who
picked apart picket-fence scripture
Silence isn’t violence it’s a death sentence