The Slam

12/26/02

first draft

I never wanted much, only the answer to god the universe and everything.

I watch people conversing and connecting, raising their arms and faces in excitement, dancing to a drum that bursts to life in a moment grows pulsates evolves and produces.

Yet I am deaf and cannot feel the beat, so I settle with watching and deducing the rhythm, using cold attentive analysis.

An alien watching a scope, confused and exited, baffled and beguiled.

I started this journey 15 years ago studying the profound and the profane. Blowing my mind only to run back in line for a really great roller coaster ride.

I've worshiped the god of philosophy.

I've worshiped the god of gods.

I've worshiped the god of marriage.

I've worshiped the god of money, prostrated at the altar of success, while spiritus swung its sword at my neck.

Saved by the divine and ever loving hand of it.

Like Lazarus I died and in the tomb of a zen monastery it came and commanded me to wake from my sleep.

I saw it!

Not in the profound or the profane.

Not in the pimp of belief.

Not in the all-powerful god of fear.

But in the quirky relationships of people and life, that thing we would rather forget but in the end becomes the essence of humanity the stuff of it. I watched it shyly raising its head out of the corner of my eye. A father with his son. Two lovers without a care. Teenagers feeling their way into adulthood. Seeing this I set about describing it to the best of my abilities.

Attempting to define the indefinable.

Using the finite to express the infinite.

Like a dewdrop reflecting the moon, the really real that is false.

I marshaled my abilities to craft prose, like bread crumbs leading to the truth, the home of it.

Only to get the lowest score by a bunch of neigh-bobs at a poetry slam.