I definitely feel out of place,
at this late-night poetry
slam, over 30 years older
than this crowd of teens and
twenties
who are speaking
their bitter truth:
the fracture of relation-
ships, the lines of intersection,
narratives
of racist taunts
and kicks
to the fucking head
(from the anti-queer brigade),
and it’s not that I can’t relate—
fag! tossed my way
from all the kids
now grey with age, playing
sudoku by the fire
but that’s another shoddy
poem I’ll likely write—
for within this present moment
Naomi has hit her stride,
hooking me along
with her inflection,
familiar as it is,
an echo of a hundred thousand
poets who rarely glance
upon a page,
or don a pair of glasses
sliding down
along their nose, one that’s
burrowed in a book
these flashy vogues
have yet to read,
and her eyes are seared in mine,
perhaps wondering
why I’m here,
so straight and pale a visage,
so Luddite
without a phone,
that I’ve likely never heard of
Twitch and TikTok,
knowing that I’d be lost—
especially in the latter,
where every word’s a beat,
every syllable
always locked
in recollection,
where youth and fleeting beauty
pirouette,
in the shadow of a bomb
that’s failed to show,
for generations,
of which poets
abandoned birds and blooms
to howl against its menace.
Andreas Gripp
July 20, 2023
RF Image
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