honeydunce

I’m going to return with a dream.

I’m in a school hallway of some sort, and it’s early morning. The sun might
be coming up. It’s hard to tell because a group of us poets just finished a long
flight to here, our destination. There’s a team of us from Pittsburgh, arriving to
compete. Yes, after no longer slamming I am still dreaming of poetry slams. This
time, it’s the Nationals. What year? I don’t know. But in my dream I recognize that
specific kind of nervous, that anticipation from my days of competing…where you
walk around trying to take all the new in while simulataneously mouthing your
words, your familiar, over and over and over again in preparation.

I do not dream about getting on stage; I dream about that: the preparation. The arrival.
My unmistakable giddy youth, that feeling of being in a brand new city. I see writers
I remember from years previous, writers I admire and get nervous around–like Rachel
and Stacy and Marty and Dawn and Jason. I hear their voices echo in the school
hallways, see the luggage of writers piled along the walls.

I wake up missing the act of leaving town to speak.

I take a different route to work. There are a lot more hills to contend with, and I only
stop once to peel off two layers–the morning chill is deceiving and I’m pouring sweat
at the crest of the first decent-sized climb. I trudge my way up and float my way down;
I lock up my bike without really thinking about it. In the mirror I look like a crazy-haired warrior,
face still flushed from the spin to Oakland. There’s a banana sitting
like a rock in my stomach. I keep thinking about my dream, about that hallway full of
poets, how at the last minute my sister showed up to cheer me on.

There are aspects to the writer part of myself that I tend to forget. Sometimes the
years of experience escape me, in favor of a present confusion or lull or difference.
Times and lives change. How can I forget about the stage in Toronto, in Cleveland, in Seattle,
at Canal Street? What of this spark still going? What’s changed about the
things I toss into the burning to maintain it?

This, from a dream. I woke up a little stumped–going forward, how do I properly nurture
myself as a writer? Cultivation, thirst, persistence, and risk. Risk and risk and risk.
Risk it all, self. There is nothing to lose, even less time to lose it. You’ll never find the walls
to leave behind if you insist on sitting in the middle of the room, if you never push against
the boundaries of the space you reside in. And what’s in the space? How is your filter?
What about the images that make you feel like you’re burning from the inside out…what about
what moves you? Where is it? Is it near? Is it far? Are you aware, are you wondering?

And I ask myself, and I ask myself, and I ask myself: what on this earth are you waiting for?
What on earth do you think is waiting for you?