musings of a damned mind

“About me”…

“Hobbies and Interests”…

“What do you do in your spare time?”

I find it hard to believe that my generation thinks the best way of getting to know someone is an impersonal, borderline narcissistic section of a facebook profile

Or a myspace page,

But I guess I’m guilty of that too or I wouldn’t have cause to write this.

I sit there, by that flashing computer screen and consider what to write.

“I’m a law student”

“I’m a martial artist”

“I like red heads”

“I’m a fan of small cats called errol”

I mean what?

What am I put here?

Are we so defined but what we do that we can sum up what we are in a matter of words, of labels?

I think about for a second then slowly type…

I’m a writer,

“Poet”

I sit back from that screen, that shield of glass and plastic that hides me from the outside world and ponder what the person reading this will think of me.

Skinny jeans and a studded belt?

Skull-and-crossbone T-shirt and a side parting?

A poet, a whinger, an emotional?

Do they perhaps think of some quaint little hobby, noticing daffodils and throwing off quirky limericks about cheese.

Do they see an angsty teenager, crying his heart out because one more girl fucked him over. Another voice lost in a sea of self pity.

Let me tell you what poets do.

We write,

We talk,

we think.

We spread ideas where there were none,

We propagate cacophony in the darkest night with erudite words

You’d never have heard.

We take the loudest voice in a back water club in a town no ones heard of and reduce it to blessed silence.

We spin out a web of our hopes and dreams and lives that you might look on them and marvel at humanity’s beauty.

We drag you into harshest corners of existence and force you to look in the deepest wells of yourself.

THIS is what I do.

I speak words that make the strongest most violent of men sink to their haunches and weep.

I take a pain so personal and cutting it would reduce any to tears and spin it into a necklace of rhyme so sweet it lifts your heart to read of it.

I send a verse to a friend who’s heart is crushed by the weight of the world and it makes her smile, for the first time in years.

I speak words that puncture the vainglorious and drag them down to look the rest of us at eye level.

I am a POET

I speak,

WE speak.

We are the voice of the people, the true glorious revolution and we WILL be heard.

We will take the most sacred of lies written in the most holy of books and shred them of their deception,

We will take everything you have assumed about humanity and the world and yourself and twist it around so you see your broken reflection, with all it’s sins still upon it.

And we will make you feel good about it.

I am a POET

You want to define me by what I do then define my by this.

I sit while my black heart pumps ink blood out onto a sheet of velum through wrists slit by a fountain pen.

I stand before crowds who do not know me and bare my soul that they might steal yours.

I stand on the shoulders of Shelly, of Shakespeare, of Wilde and Shaw,

Of the bards and the story tellers and the historians.

With the flames of words and the swords of rhythm, envenomed with my own blood and pain I will show what lurks in all of us that you might exorcise your demons.

We are poets,

We speak the truth and your ears will bleed with the weight of it.

We will burn the cowards and the bigots and the hypocrites in the fires of their guilt until nothing is left but ash and dust and ink runs through the street at our feet.

We are poets,

We speak the truth,

We ask you to listen,

That’s all I need to say,

About me.