The poems I slammed with tonight

at the First Line/Last Line slam at the Asylum, where I took second place.  (Out of three competitors — don’t get too excited…)

Greetings From Worcester       

Greetings from Worcester, 
the Heart Of The Commonwealth!

Unlike Boston it doesn’t sprawl so much as simmer 
like plain old stew in a pot in the hills 
at the head of the Blackstone River.   

It’s a city without a skyline. 
Nothing sticks out much from a distance.
Maybe it’s those hills that keep our thinking contained. 
Maybe that’s why most of our buildings are triple-decked and diner-squat,
and the only towers are in the low sections where they don’t make much of a fuss.

The stew’s made up of people who used to say,
"Greetings From Monrovia, San Juan, Khe Sanh, Port Au Prince, San Jose, Decatur, Attleboro, Uxbridge…"
and then ended up here, so now they say "Greetings From Worcester"
in a more or less resigned tone,
their faces betraying their bemusement
that this is where they’re now from. 

It doesn’t take much to get here or to leave. 
People do it all the time –
splash in and out, and often back in again.
This pot sits on an old gas stove
and never quite comes to a boil,
so the ones whoseek the electricity of bigger places 
go elsewhere when it rolls too quietly.

But there are some who belong here.

We’re the ones who know that though 
the flame is low, it’s blue hot at the center
and if you get down below to where it burns,
it cooks you through to where you taste
the way you were always meant to. 

We’re the good stuff you dig through the bowl
to get at
and we’re the ones you’ll miss
when you’re done.

If you leave
and come back to visit from wherever you’ve landed, 
we’re the ones who look at you,
remind you of the daffy flavors we offer —

our greasy spoons,
our broken streets,
our ravaged trees,
our wintered-in faces of stolen comfort —
and at our center, right in our very heart of hearts,
a sad boy
riding a scared turtle
into improbable ecstasy,
making do just the way we all do.

We’re the ones who say,
without malice,
knowing you’re the same as us: 
it’s good to see you again.

It doesn’t taste the same without you.

Wish you were here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Moon

The moon,
it is said,
can draw out our aspirations.

After all, 
the earth is mostly water
forever worked on by the moon. 

So we stand 
knee deep in water
to look at the moon. 

We think we can feel it 
urging our momentum 
toward what we desire.

We call the
most active dreamers
"lunatics" to honor that, 

and so we hesitate to dream big. 
That’s an honor
we don’t desire.

We grow black and blue
from where the earth has pounded us
and our skins prune up as we age 

from the long action of the moon upon them. 
But we keep staring
at the moon thinking: if only, if only… 

Listen: men went to the moon once.
They came back when they learned
that our momentum dies there. 

We learned that the moon 
was once as fluid as earth is now, but   
only when it was violently moved from outside. 

Nothing there moved on its own, 
and every step on the moon
just made the visitors rise, weakly, 

back toward the earth.   
Let the lunatics have the moon. 
We can move ourselves more than it can move us. 

Any dream we have 
is an earthly one,
no matter how crazy it seems. 

The moon is what we make it,
not the other way around.
It only changes when it’s struck, 

never strikes of its own accord,
and even the tides
are just following a dead thing. 

All we have to do
to make a life we yearn for
is move toward it on our own. 

The moon is no god.
Let that poor old corpse
sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~

Details of the slam rules here.