Week+One!

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Post Your Poem From Week One of the Varsity Slam Team Meeting PROMPT: -Flower Vase -Custodian -Monastery -Dolphin -Coal Mine -Cinder Block -Barney -Che Guevera Poster


 * All Hail the Dictator of America**

Where have the children gone to?

The radioactive neon glow of TV screens illuminate their faces, bellies grow larger, ballooning to resemble cinder blocks of fat. Stack one, upon the other. Deep wells of black oceans fall beneath their eyes, with cold expressions. No happiness. No enjoyment. Just empty. Flower vases upon windowsills, are empty. No flowers, no beauty. And they do not see the difference. Coal mines, they are undisturbed. Wood frames crisscrossing, blocking entrance, lay unbroken. No teenagers spraying artistic signatures upon historic, old caves. No. They choose to stay inside. and the cause, you know his name. He is the reason. He is the start of this madness. Love and family, he repeats melodies, drilling it into your mind like soft whispers of propaganda. And his face is plastered, upon billboards and newspapers, upon the TV screens of every channel and commercial. Angry, old custodians sweep up a piece of his essence everyday, and they stare. Looking at the present, and shaking their heads at the future. His purple muzzle morphs into Che Guevera’s facade. His shaggy hair and green burette, becoming one with the green polka dots and purple body paint. Speaking of unity but acting for another cause.

-Sarah “Disco Frost”


 * Shattered Life**

The spidery crack ran like the lines of a rictor scale. Around the glimmering face of his flower vase. He was already weak and disjointed like the splotched and dripping visage of that grimy Che Guevera poster torn from the fence. Its tattered pieces flutter to the utter depths of him where he is clutching the weakened vase to his weakened heart. The litters of poster barely graze the neck of the vase and it shatters and scatters like light and sound and the shards scoop in and out of reality like a dolphin in the ocean's wake. A wake that is ultimately created by that cinder block of illogical reason dropped from heaven's pearly gates through the stratosphere of his conscious mind. It had barely missed the fragile vase. A vase so fragile that it rivaled the idea that is Barney, ever teetering on the brink of fun-loving friend, or an odd and plushy twist of evolution. Evolution that put princesses in their towers, monks in their monasteries, black in its coal mine, and a shattered life of opaque glass on the tiled floor. A floor that is unforgiving, but ever forgetting as the shards are unknowingly swept aside by the night-shift custodian.

-Megsgonnajuxtayourposition

The Modern American Trust Fund Baby

He was just another punk with a Che Guevara poster on his cinderblock dorm room wall. Rage Against the Machine thumping from his speakers sounding like a flower vase being smashed against the front door of a monastery over and over and over and over  again.

We called him a trustafarian. His dad was a lawyer in Connecticut, and he drove a Land Rover worth as much as a year’s tuition at the liberal arts college he attended.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">Next to Che Guevara was a Bob Marley <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">poster with the words “One Love” <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">written underneath the visage <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">of the man who wanted to free Jamaica <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">from the colonization of the British, <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">but now Marley’s face is on the wall <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">of the son of the oppressor.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">He’s Holden Caulfield the biggest phony <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">you’ll meet, complaining about the inauthentic <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">world he’s been shoved into, <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">when he’s about as hip and authentic <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">as Barney. <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;"> He’s the kid screaming about social injustice <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">and the plight of the American Worker, all whilst he’s <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">throwing his McDonald’s wrapper on the floor <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">for the overworked, underpaid custodian to pick up.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">The irony in his life went so deep that he’d have to put <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">on a hard had, grab a flashlight, and travel down the coal mine <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">of his identity to finally get to who he really is.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">Whoever that is.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">He sat in political science class and complained that the Bush <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">administration committed terrible atrocities at Guantanamo Bay, <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">all the while not knowing where Guantanamo Bay is <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">or that his Che Guevara poster has a lot to do with the answer <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">to the question he’ll never be able to ask.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">Even if he could reach inside himself to ask the right questions <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">he was too busy spending his winter break on the Florida Keys <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">in the mini-mansion his father’s corporate law firm <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">lent out to its senior members and their families—while <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">Che Guevara’s Cuba was ninety miles away, he was swimming <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">with the dolphins in the warm ocean.

<span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">At the end of his four years, he cut his dread locks, <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">trashed his posters, and took a job on wall street <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">and when someone mentions communism or socialism <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">or any –ism other than <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">capitalism, <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">he scoffs <span style="font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode','Lucida Grande',sans-serif;">at their blatant naivete.

-"Master P"

Ellyn "Firehawk" Touchette

__Tylenol & Penicillin__

In the years that I've known you, you've never caught on to how much like a disease you really are. With a single glance, you can turn my day blacker than a coal miner's face and command the forty three previously unused muscles in my face to spring into action. Like that classic Che Guevera poster that covers the walls of the insecure from coast to coast of this country, you lack the originality even to allow me to gain the sympathy of my peers. Like a virus, you climb into my brain through my sinus passages and, like some sort of hateful custodian, sweep all traces of self esteem from my mind until I cower at your feet like a frightened animal. You are the conformer in the monastery who can transform my beliefs into doubt; who can take my cinderblock of a cosmology and dissolve it into the residue that gathers on the sides of an uncleaned flower vase. You are the bacterial infection that can be neither treated nor cured; no amount of penicillin can clear you from my blood stream. No amount of imbibed tylenol can ease the pain that stems from the cavity in my chest where there used to be a soul. You've robbed me of the ability to love, the talent I once had for placing my being into the hands of a man and letting him run with me where he will. You've stripped me of my heart, which I wore so proudly on my sleeve when I met you. You've even robbed me of that.

Ian "Metasthesis" Hawkes

**CUSTODIAN**

Sometimes it’s not worth firing the custodian. He is the scowling one, and you are sure he is out to get you. A cinder block in the middle of your linoleum, you trip every time over his expression of complete and mind-numbing complacency. You flinch every time he touches mother’s flower vase. His mop swings unnervingly close to the Che Guevera Poster, and Heaven help him if he crimps your style. And can’t you remember finding him in the back past the keys and the locks and the welds and the barricade sweeping the dust off of Barney. And the Dolphin. Her Dolphin. Scream like a freight train you did. And away he walked. Shuffle. Complacent. Wordless. You would do it, I can see it in your eyes, you would fire the lake-faced buzzard faster than he could even split his ever lateral lips. But there is a truth in his unnervingly bottomless eyes. Without the mop, and the windex, and the scrub brush it would all fall apart. And as quickly as you splashed the paint on the paper thin parapets they would curl and brown as would the doors and the locks. Oh the terror! The world would see you for your Barney’s and your Dolphins. And the layers of filth even these things will turn from your monastery to your personal coal mine. Sometimes It’s not worth firing the custodian.

The custodians of the Earth,

are the dolphins.

The smooth, streamlined mammals,

masters of the sea.

In many ways they are smarter than us.

Because maybe it isn't having a big house or a fast car that is important.

Maybe the important things are the little things,

the things dolphins understand.

Things like play, live and love,

things that we forget all to often.

Remember when watching Barney would make you happy?

Those childhood joys that come so easily,

and are lost just as easily.

The dolphins have not lost their little moments,

their lives are little moments.

Moments like when you stop with your parents at a roadside stand,

and buy a nice cold bottle of water.

Moments like when a playful nudge can turn into an all out wrestling match.

Moments like that.

But we humans are much too busy to deal with trivial matters like cool water, or good humored nudges.

We are too busy putting on our jumpsuits, filled with cinderblocks and iron chain.

After all, a jumpsuit can be difficult to put on!

But once you have your arms in the sleeves, and all the straps an buckles in place,

you are free to jump off a satellite,

and fall to the bottom of the sea.

The dolphins are confused.

After all, why is this extraterrestrial debris raining into the ocean?

The dolphins nudge and prod with their noses, trying to figure out what is in these cloth sacks that fall

so quickly

to the ocean floor.

But then they give up, because it doesn't matter.

So they swim near shore, and poke their heads up above the water.

The dolphins can see dry land, and it looks dry indeed.

It looks like the earth has vomited a coal mine,

farted a desert,

and belched out a last farewell made of sandstone.

As far as the dolphin's eye can see is waste and want.

The dolphins are eager to explore,

so they grow lands and walk up on land,

and walk around and stuff.

The dolphins are pretty bored with the last remnants of humanity.

A Che Guvera poster here, and a Barney plush there.

Here a Ke$ha CD, there a Justin Beiber CD, everywhere a bad CD.

A broken flower vase, crying tears infused with rose petals.

A monastery, filled with the emptiness left by deserting disbelievers.

The dolphins are really bored, and so they turn to one another,

and with a series of clicks and snaps,

decide to go back to the sea.

-Adam "Super Fist Enigma Puncher" .
 * Sitting On A Cinderblock**

Sitting on a cinderblock, Head on knees, She holds the flower vase in her hand, That she smashed on the ground, Lifting her head and turning, Dark stains under her eyes, Like the soot on the faces of the rebels, The rebels from the coal mines, Making $6.35 an hour, Which they waste on the Che Guevara posters, Splayed on their walls.

She has a poster on her wall, Not of Che Guevara, A poster of Barney, The dinosaur from her childhood, She once loved. Ripped and blemished, In tatters now. It crinkles with the gusts from the door slamming, And it settles When the door squeaks open again, Screeching like a dolphin does, When it wants to play.

She once wanted to play, But she’s through with that now, So she sits there on that cinderblock, Head on her knees, Vase in one hand, smashed and shattered. Stains beneath her eyes, From crying, Recalling her brother, One of the rebels from the coal mine, Who packed his bags one day, And left for the monastery, Cleaned himself up, Like a custodian to his heart, And became a better person, Than she would ever be.

-Lincoln "Linkin Grey" Gray