SPOKEN WORD BY A LESBIAN
Poetry is where I first fell in love with words and expressed my desire for women, owned up to, ached for, and marveled on the page at the often unrequited beauty of the “love that dare not speak its name.”
But spoken word is how I “came out” and stayed out.
I started by winning spoken word competitions at an evangelical Christian college with original lesbian erotic poetry. Later, I collaborated with electronica composers in San Francisco and London, a-mused at the art we could only make together in “Great Conversation” and how much more meaning they gave my work through the interpretive lenses of their music and experience.
The sound of a poem, of the lines breaking and bending to my will, the chance to communicate my own favorite meaning from it has become an indispensable part of my poetic process. Voicing poetry lets all the quiet hidden personalities lurking between the lines get out. It makes them real, makes them mean, undeniable, often funny, irreverent, cements them as herstory/mystory, as truth — and then some.
andJuliet: Peg
andJuliet is Dante Jones on noise and Andrea Renee Johnson on syllables. Jones resides and creates in London. Johnson lives, writes, and reads in San Francisco. The cacophony left behind in the wake of their collaboration can perhaps best be described by Johnson’s words in one of their recordings: ”…Some might call this spillage the poetry of the mad, the city reeking of it…disgusting and…delicious…” Come. Eat. Enjoy.
Back
Tempests and traffic / Roar / Leave me in the middle / Opened, but one breath in the void / Indecisions to be made
Nothing really but ourselves
In the way of this change
Giants born eyeless into a world of infrared vision
And what if the moment
I finally learned to move on
Was the first time I shouldn’t have
Given up
On the her
I am painting circles around
In the tender very center of my mind
Imagining I’m not cold
And know just where I’m gone
I dream in facades
Tearing — verses — torn
Mistaken — because I can be
Known for this
As she moves on into her past
And I educate myself re-over
As to the difference between
Walking away
And simply walking
Because I can
And that’s what I do
So help me God
Muse
This voice in my ear / A woman / And we are One
Pale with history
I take comfort from her
When I cannot beat
She wins me
Above all
Seduces me
In the direction of life
Bleeds my sin
Clear as the Christ
Holds me within her own soul
When I am weary of form
The want of her
Brings clarity
Like never before
Nor in the having
She walks me in the ways of God
Her shade ever at my head
Means eternal day
And though she shall never be mine
Yet am I hers
Reincarnation
Even the open within is shut up and musty / Willingly closed and smelling no longer of gold
God Herself called me up
Only to deny the existence of heaven
And I can no longer hear the wailing women
For though they are many
They are lost inside the pregnant silence
They shuffle against one another
With eyes closed tight
Afraid of the glowing walls
The soul container
Denying birth forever
Which means this is a kind of life, eternal
They make me long for peace
I have gone eye-level with the grass more than once
And found it
The empty field, yellow
One tree, me, and a breath
That has lost the ache to sigh her name
It will discover me soon
Whether now or then
We are fulfilled
If only because we know we are not made so
There is no end