Sarah Kay's If I Should Have A Daughter, was my first ever encounter with spoken word poetry. You...say the poems...out loud? This is madness! I say to myself as I clicked on her TEDtalk. But it was only after watching the heartwarming To This Day by Shane Koyczan that I fell in love with spoken word. I thought they were mesmerizing, and the way they said it made it seem so...natural. These people were eloquent and brilliant and I became obsessed with a string of spoken word poets. One of whom was Alysia Harris. The first video I watched of her was when she was a teenager, talking about her ex-boyfriend who was a complete dickhead (my crass description isn't doing the actual poetry justice). She had soul, and I liked that. I watched more recent videos of her spoken word, and I stumbled across Cab Rides and the Morning After. I found myself nodding to every word, yelling "PREACH!" like a black man in a church, with his hands in the hair and his eyes closed, feeling every word down to the nooks of his lost soul.
Lets get to it:
Alysia Harris, how can I even being to describe Alysia Harris. She personifies things that I thought could not be personified. She describes emotions that I thought were ineffable. She paints a picture with words that brings the Mona Lisa to shame. You can feel her raw emotion in every syllable and she becomes so...vulnerable.
This poem made such an impact on me because of how she presented it. How honest, how beautiful, like it's a reflection of every Friday nights. It still sends shivers down my spine to listen to some of the lines. She talks about confidence, beauty, sexuality, promiscuity and loneliness. In 5 minutes time, she is able to make me reflect more than a 50-minute lecture by my Christian high school teachers about immorality and licentiousness.
I don't know about you guys but Cab Rides and the Morning After is such a relatable topic. Yes I've been out enjoying my time after midnight with my friends or whoever I found that night, and yes I do go home and feel a tad bit... dirty. As if I had just soaked myself in a pit of shame and mud. Of course, that feeling isn't going to hinder me from doing the same thing next week and the week after that. After all, I have the rest of my life to be a responsible adult, might as well make mistakes now and live life in the dumbest possible way.
I love naked white sheets, how they work like paint thinner to remove last nights fresco. How they dry you off after soaking in a tub of room temperature lovers. I love the cab rides you take back into yourself, away from the still beautiful people who are all elsewhere doing impossibly beautiful things. When you arrive home you will greet the mirror like a criminal in a lineup.
Oh no truer words were ever spoken! Arriving home, room spinning, and looking at myself in the mirror; makeup smudged, hair curly with sweat, and dress impossibly tight and short, I can't help but have a plethora of self-depricating thoughts. 'What am I doing? This dress looks weird. Why did I just do that? Please tell me I didn't say that to him. That was fun! I am never drinking alcohol ever again.' And I just stand here, momentarily judging myself and how I was that night, as if I were looking at myself through someone else's eyes.
I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could’ve been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.
Yeah sounds about right. When you wear that dress, do your makeup just right, and then step into those heels. Oh man, heels transform you like Clark Kent and his cape. You can't help but know that shit is going to go down after this.
I was dancing in an attempt to melt the belts off every man in the room, but I heard the truth that night. A Turk speaking Spanish didn’t know me from Adam said “tú crees en Dios pero tú haces malas cosas." You believe in God, but you do bad things.
Suddenly, I realized that I was in a place where all they play is house music, but can’t say I really felt at home. In the barely audible, barely recognizable zone between having a good time and simply wasting it.
Raise your hand if you've ever had the sudden epiphany in the middle of a huge party. Either a 'what am I doing here?' or a 'is this really what I should be doing right now?' and you drown yourself with more booze to erase the unanswerable questions in your head. One time I was at a club with my friends when we were sophomores, and I was completely sober whilst everyone was off their heads. And I sat on the couch (can you really call it a couch if it feels like a slab of concrete?) and looked up at my friends, dancing on tabletops and chugging more alcohol than the safe amount for a human being. Looking at that scene through sober goggles made me rethink my life decisions. I ended up sleeping on the couch, being lullabied by the rhythmic vibrations of the sofa.
So thank God the stars don’t judge us for what we do beneath them. Thank God the stars don’t see the evil we commit under their names. Thank God for the silence, for the dimness, for nights spent alone.
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