I gotta talk to you for a minute about Andrea Gibson. I’ve got talk about her, because I don’t know if I have ever, ever been so moved by the work of a single individual.

Andrea Gibson is a master of spoken word, an award winning slam poet.

“Gibson is also among the nation’s most admired and emulated poets. Her verse is at once personal and political, concrete and abstract, feminist and universal, filled with incinerating verbs and metaphor and delivered with gut-punching urgency. You can hear the ache in her soul every time she utters God’s name, and even her inhales sound desperate. It’s not uncommon for audiences to gasp at some of her turns of phrase or rise to their feet when she finishes a poem.” MATT PEIKEN

She is a woman of uncommon passion, her performances lit by an internal fire that powers her through her poems with the force of a freight train, slicing through lines with the sharpness and precision of sword. She spits her words out like bullets – hitting me right in the gut, and in the next second changes course and breaths out her message with a gentle caress that makes her words drift to my ears like leaves falling softly to the ground. Every word carefully chosen, unflinchingly delivered, cutting through bullshit and convention with the energy of someone determined to create change but also with the tenderness of someone whose heart is so big she has to hurt more than most of us. She performs with ferocity and with compassion and with so much feeling that I am left raw and exposed by the power of her honesty.

I want you to watch these videos. I want you to close your eyes and absorb her words, her passion, her activism, her fire. I want you to feel her work with every fiber of your being. I want your toes to tingle and your heart to pound and for you to feel changed by what you hear. I don’t know exactly why I’m telling you this, why I think you need instructions or set expectations. I can’t quite imagine that you could listen to these words and not do all these things. I don’t know that it is possible to be fully present and aware and NOT be wholly moved by the spirit and soul of what this woman creates in the performance of her art.

Blue Blanket
I am moved by every single piece I have heard her read, but this one – this one more than any other – brings me to my knees. It slams into me and makes my breath feel tight in my lungs and my heart thud in my chest. If you have ever been violated, if you have ever sat and held a woman who has been violated while she cried or sat in horrified numbness, then you will feel this poem with every last cell in your body and the final line will remain a part of you long after you have finished listening.

I do.
Love poem and political statement all at once, this is just one the millions of reasons why it matters that love just be love, without restrictions, or inequality or limits on who and how and why.

“i never needed more
than the stars on your grin to lead me home
for fifty years you were my favorite poem
and i’d read you every night
knowing i might never understand every word
but that was okay cause the lines of you
were the closest thing to holy i’d ever heard
you’d say this kind of love has to be a verb”

Dive
Life dosesn’t rhyme. Paradox, irony, mirrored reflections - it’s all the beautiful grey between stark black and white, it’s the ambiguous spaces between absolutes where the brilliance of life resides.

“”it’s your worst sin saving your fucking life
it’s the devil’s knife carving holes into you soul
so angels will have a place to make their way inside
life doesn’t rhyme
still life is poetry — not math
all the world’s a stage
but the stage is a meditation mat
you tilt your head back
you breathe
when your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain
and you teach your sons and daughters
there are sharks in the water
but the only way to survive
is to breathe deep
and dive”

Say Yes
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before…this poem is hope - empowering, uplifting hope. This poem is the life I want to live.

For Eli
This is how I feel about war – not just the one we’re in now – but every last one of them.

““one third of the homeless men in this country are veterans
and we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
with pretty yellow ribbons
while giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands
tell me what land of the free
sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
hones them like missiles
then returns their bones in the middle of the night
so no one can see”

Why do I write?

Before I share my answer to that most provocative question, I have to say that this was a most delicious exercise, and I hope that some of you take it on.

In recent months I have felt an insatiable need to write (and no, I don’t share most of it here). Most days there is a period where I am utterly compelled to write; I am on fire with words that need to be given release. I completely lose myself in the little bubble of space that includes nothing except for me, the computer screen and the keyboard, and I write until I am done. It almost feels as if there is a contract I have with the universe to use these words, and I cannot truly relax until that contract is fulfilled.

“I must write it out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living”~ Anne Morrow Lindinburg

For me, in the act of translating my life into words, I get the opportunity to own my experience on a whole different level. Not just to own it, but to understand it, to relive it, to dive into it and to step back from it. There is a wealth of perspective to be gained by existing inside and outside of our experiences at the same time.

So…why do I write?

___________

I write to quiet the tortured demons in my head and I write in hopes of transmitting the purest peace in my heart. I write to make sense of chaos and to create space in my mind. I write because I love words with unparalleled passion. I write because although I adore talking, there is no way I could ever use all the words I need to use just by speaking. I write because I am lit from within. I write because sometimes the blackness gets too dark. I write for my sanity. I write because my fingers enjoy the sensation of dancing across the keyboard, and because my ears quite like the rapid clickety-click noise of the keys when I hit a flash of inspiration. I write as a gift to myself. I sometimes write to escape real life, and other times to ground myself in reality. I write because words and phrases chase me and haunt my dreams, ordering me to rise from bed at 3am to purge them from my brain, lest they be lost forever in the whisps of night air blowing through my open bedroom window. I write because it brings together my heart, mind and soul in a most beautiful union. I write because I fear I will not otherwise remember. I write in hopes that releasing my narrative gives something to those who read it. I write because if I did not liberate these words they would create a viscous and tangled web in my mind, preventing me from moving on. I write to translate my life experience into another form. I write because it is a privilege, and out of a sense of responsibility. I write because words are my meditation. I write until I am energized by a force that comes from outside and from within. I write for immortality. I write until I am utterly and completely spent. I write because reading my thoughts helps me comprehend my reality on another level. I write because it is like glorious free-fall. I write as a gift, and I write because I am utterly selfish. I write because I am compelled to do so. I write so that I will remember, and sometimes I write so that I can forget. I write for cheap therapy. I write to become empty, and to fill myself up. I write as an exercise in control. I write because I am on fire with inspiration. I write because it is the hardest thing I do, and I write because it is as effortless as breathing. I write because in the act of composition I am both lost and found in a single moment. I write because I fear that without writing I would cease to exist. I write because words speak to me - they whisper, they shout, they sing – they beg me to find a purpose for them, to put them to work and make them into something greater than merely the sum of their parts. I write to shut out the world, and I write to hold the universe into the palm of my hand. I write to freeze time and to make time pass me by. I write because of late nights and early mornings and the sound of crashing thunder and the smell of hot coffee and the feeling of sand between my toes after a day at the beach. I write because broken hearts are inevitable and I write because I believe in pure, blinding love. I write for both impermanence and for eternity. I write for companionship, and to find the most blissful, sweet solitude I have ever experienced. I write to put the bad things to rest, and I write to relive the good things over and over again. I write when I am wracked with self-doubt, and I write in periods of delusional narcissism. I write for every emotion ever experienced by any person in the universe. I write to prove myself. I write because I believe there is something more, and I write because I believe I am all that there is. I write because words are energy. I write because there is no choice but to write.

I write because I must.
__________

And so now again I ask you….why do YOU write?

Go read Julie Pippert’s brief but dead on commentary on images of breasts in the media, over at Using My Words.

All I need to add is this:

ditto.

you once told me that
i was your mirror
and so one day
i looked in your eyes and I thought
if my reflection is this beautiful then maybe
it is is worth trying
to love myself.

we’ve been together
forever, i think
swimming in a vast ocean
and one day the waves
crashed us onto this dry, dusty
desert
and I know that
you are
my gift from the sea

thank you for helping me
to see that
sometimes
(if it’s done right)
co-dependence can feel
healthy

we don’t know everything
about one another
we don’t have to share
all the details
of convoluted pasts and presents and futures
we don’t even have to talk
with you
the silence is full of
a million secrets

your hands are so soft
and so small
and so strong
and although they carry so much
they always
have room for
my hands

on the outside
we look different
and I think that
we sometimes confuse
other people
they don’t know
that underneath it all
we are the same.

you understand my libra heart
and you know that
one can be
both insecure
and narcissistic
at the very same time
and also that
it is not unreasonable
to always expect
to get what you want.

so what if deciding where to
eat dinner
can take us
three hours
because
i never
notice
the time pass.

loving you
is the easiest
thing
I have ever done.

Happy Birthday Mani