Here is my Atlanta Write Club winning essay. Topic: Shallow.
Shallow
by Mike Molina
The square of the stage never seems so small as the moment
you step off it to return to the crowd. The hot, lonely distance of being the center
of attention is reduced to a dim simmer in those brief moments of descent. The tangy pang of peach light, like a
protracted camera flash, reappears to coat your shoes as you grope for space
among the maze of feet leading back to your seat. The applause seems polite or trite or
contrite or erudite enough.
But it’s the conversations during the break that really break
the moldy shadowy distance between poets who certainly aren’t competing for the
best poem of the night, certainly aren’t slamming for points, certainly just
want to reach deep into the minds of a few worthy listeners. It’s the conversations that tell all.
“What did you think of the piece,” I asked passive aggressively,
daring her to tell the truth, confident she would offer nothing but a dusting
of praise sprinkled like powdered sugar on my puffed up, beignet of an ego.
“It didn’t suck,” she said.
The words clicked around my head like the cowrie shells she
had threaded through her carefully coiffed dreadlocks.
“It didn’t suck.”
Well I guess that’s good news coming from a spoken word poet
with dreads raining cowrie shells and big copper bangles imprinting themselves
on her wrists and giant polished stone beads jiggling between her breasts… Coming from one of the in crowd of culture
iconoclasts, draped in generic African patterns wrapped around her authentic African
skin which made her detailed white teeth all the more white as she sucked them
together to say “suck” as in “it didn’t suck”… Coming from one of Atlanta’s
jaggiest gate-keepers of Black cool, one of the bohemian bourgeoisie, I guess I
should take it as a compliment. But what
she said next, not so much.
“But there was a moment when I just wished you would shut the
fuck up.”
Tough talk that echoed, curdling in the distance fog I
quickly shushed around her like a burst of stage smoke. I could hear her thoughts as clear as the vodka
I choked her words down with.
“You light-skinned, green-eyed, Yale pretty boy… you been
given your whole life and now you headlining at 7 Stages…” I can hear her shading me to sharpen the
distance between us and I accept that.
We aren’t the same.
She needs her blacker than, downer than, realer than linear
gradations. She needs to shrink others’
pain so she can carry her own. She needs
her anger at a world that privileges my skin and my balls and peddles my degree
as proof of an American dream she woke up from in a cold sweat long ago. She needs to hate me and the cock I swung in
on and the blissful ignorance of how hard it is to see another poet shine. She needs her opinion lounging in her
mid-night fears, lazing in the hammock of her resignation, tied between trees
of insecurities, rooted in the muck of her mire, stuck in the sands of her time,
in the glass hours where she preserves her fermented torment for the cold nights
when only hate will heat her heart. She
needs all the courage she can muster even if it it’s only applied to dull the
luster of my shine. She needs this moment and so I let her have it.
“Thanks for your opinion.
I’m going to talk to someone worth talking to now.” And I walked away without looking back to
catch her reaction, though in my mind her forehead crinkled under the heat of
blowback.
I walked towards a nice white man whose eyes said ‘speak with
me.’
“Tight, tight,” he said sounding like the quick swinging
hammers of a typewriter – “tight, tight.”
This white John Henry, big square-headed beard in a red Paul Bunyon
shirt came to tell me two twin words about my work. “Tight, tight.”
Tight? Was it “tight” how
I merged mythic and scientific imagery to create a voice of penultimate
universality? Tight? Or was it “tight” how I rooted the meaning of
the piece in the meter of the rhythm and rhyme, i.e. it ain’t about the chicken
or the egg, it is about the math that added one to the other. Tight?
Or did he feel like he had to slang his way through our
difference like some boy in the hood from Roswell who loves Tupac and Ice Cube
and WuTang and knows what poontang and a badonkadonk are? Did he need to knead his words into decade
old baguettes of loafing, lazy cliché just to try his best to keep pace with
the hip hop we grew up in?
That he talked to me is enough, that he spent his time and
talked to me was enough to appreciate until he ruined it by slinging slang at
me like a not quite trained monkey in the cage that keeps him safe from White
Supremacy. You want to be down Mr.
Charlie? Then shake my hand and tell me
what was “tight” about the piece that is one of my favorites, the piece that I
love every time I say it, that speaks the peak of where my spiritualty and
logic meet… a poem I’ll carry like meat on my bones till the day I die. Tight?
Keep your cliché I thought as I walked away.
I thought my way back to my car before the second half, done
with this distant cloud over Atlanta that makes shaded dreams of its stars and
blocks the light from its seedlings—the shallow sky they sell in the rectangles
between the mirrored, high rise glass of condos. The shallow words (It didn’t suck) they throw
on the hot coals of potential to steam the envy off their soft skins. The shallow water they wade in (tight, tight)
so as not to lose their way in case they want to turn back to the big house. The shallow end of the praise pool they
divide in tenths and slam under the big tent of competition. Keep your points, your opinions, your
estimation of the worth and the value and quality of my work and show me the
depth of your perception. “It didn’t suck,” means nothing but that it did, suck
that is. “Tight, tight,” means nothing
at all.
I talked to my windshield about Atlanta… and New Orleans and
Oakland and New Haven and Brooklyn and all the places I haven’t found acknowledgement
of the value of my work. I freestyle
laps about my dad’s lap and how I don’t remember how it felt to sit in his
approval and how I punished him at my law school graduation and how he died after
I apologized and how he must not have seen my potential to leave me to the
hours I spent alone finding my way and how he must not have understood my talent
since he didn’t invest in it and how he must not have believed in me since he
didn’t take time to find out what I believed about myself. That I wasn’t good enough to keep him home, that
our family was not worth not giving up on…
And I find myself in the parking lot of Trackside Tavern
balling out the pain in the marrow that thickens my bones. The sickening drone of my snorting sniffles
unravels the riddle of my rash reactions to these brief, passing interactions
with strangers. The shallow breath of
anger reminds me. If you are
unconscious, you can drown in a few inches of water. The shallow water covers the deep.
Posts
