inception

I just came from a slam poetry reading for the first time. It evoked far more than I imagined it could, and now I can feel the last wisps of creativity leaving me as I desperately try to weave that aura into something that can live. Poetry has never been my thing. It was always someone else's thing, someone else's thing I stole for a while and put back on the nightstand. I wish I could write lines like those that were uttered tonight, and I wish I could instill the images somehow so that I can regurgitate them back to silent applause, but I'd always know that they were stolen, so I don't lay my greedy fingers on them in the first place. But if I could come up with those images on my own I'd share them a thousand times over. Someone wanted to ask if these poets get tired of reading the same thing over and over, but as long as the image is comprehensible and imagination and understanding are in play like Kant promised then everything would be just as alive as when the ink first bled to the other side of the page, maybe they could become even more so when they tumble out of the dark hollows of the mouths that first whispered them to sisters lying on old comforters, and still more when they are first shouted to the unblinking eyes of strangers sitting on wooden chairs while unintelligible salty drops form inside the under folds of their eyelids. And maybe I can steal that fire like Prometheus did even if just for a pirated copy's worth before it degrades into the next cliché of my ever ever growing list of things I've loved to death, each buried under the crinkling pages and pages that never see light.

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