March 9, 2010

Persona II

By Tony Brown

In the way a house where a murder happened
is sometimes hated and left empty for months
after, though the wood and walls

were not guilty of anything
and merely contained it, though the house
is not a murderer or a murder,

I let a person
step into me after careful consideration
and listening to them for a long while,

let them use my body and voice to speak
since I had an audience
and they did not, but might

once they stepped back out,
when people saw what I had done
they called me a liar and shunned me,

for ritual demands a sacrifice
and confusion
leads to black magic,

but that is what a shaman does
or a poet sometimes does, this comes
with the title, this dislike

is honorable, who told you
you were supposed to be beloved
all the time, it was never something

I was promised, nothing I expected,
and while there’s pain, in the end
a voice was well-heard though it was not mine,

and is the hearing not enough
to make the sacrifice worthwhile?
The Spirit wants only hearing, after all.

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About Tony Brown

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A poet with a history in slam, lots of publications; my personal poetry and a little bit of daily life and opinions. Read the page called "About..." for the details. View all posts by Tony Brown
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 1:26 am and tagged with , , and posted in poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

6 responses to “Persona II”

  • Pearl Nelson's avatar pearlnelson
    March 9th, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    This is very disturbing to me for some reason. I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve read it multiple times and each time I want to stop reading before “ritual demands” even though that’s the strongest voice of the poem. Amazingly done. I have to say I like it a lot, not withstanding my scaredy cat comments.

    Pearl

    Reply
    • Tony Brown's avatar Tony Brown
      March 9th, 2010 at 3:05 pm

      There’s a lot of debate in the slam world about “persona poems” — poems where the poet takes on another voice, another skin, or even the more loosely defined work that creates a fictional character to speak. A lot of slammers think of it as lying to do that. This poem comes from that debate. (I’ve way oversimplified it for this comment.)

      Reply

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