Young Adult Writers Perform!

Yesterday, I attended the Young Adult Writers Perform! Poetry Slam competition with my dearest ELDDS Sec 3s. The theme for the annual event was Exhibit A, inspired by:

A Woman's Issue by 

Margaret Atwood.

The woman in the spiked device

that locks around the waist and between

the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer

is Exhibit A.

The woman in black with a net window

to see through and a four-inch

wooden peg jammed up

between her legs so she can't be raped

is Exhibit B.

Exhibit C is the young girl

dragged into the bush by the midwives

and made to sing while they scrape the flesh

from between her legs, then tie her thighs

till she scabs over and is called healed.

Now she can be married.

For each childbirth they'll cut her

open, then sew her up.

Men like tight women.

The ones that die are carefully buried.

The next exhibit lies flat on her back

while eighty men a night

move through her, ten an hour.

She looks at the ceiling, listens

to the door open and close.

A bell keeps ringing.

Nobody knows how she got here.

You'll notice that what they have in common

is between the legs. Is this

why wars are fought?

Enemy territory, no man's

land, to be entered furtively,

fenced, owned but never surely,

scene of these desperate forays

at midnight, captures

and sticky murders, doctors' rubber gloves

greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge

of your own uneasy power.

This is no museum.

Who invented the word love?

We performed Remember, a poem written by Ms Nair. It was a poem about memories and remembrance. It hit home for us because of its resemblance to our SYF journey - The peak of our rehearsals and enjoyment and appreciation of the play, just before we were affected by the nerves to the crushing last minute of our shot at the Gold.

The other schools did very well too. CHIJ SNGS performed a poem about a girl that lost her parents in 911. It was an intense and gripping performance and they were so focused and passionate about the poem that I was moved. It was impactful and the ensemble was tight and well-rehearsed. Kudos to them for walking away with second place!

First place went to Crossed Out from HCI. They performed "Litany in which Certain Things are Crossed Out":

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

by Richard Siken

Every morning the maple leaves.

Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

Your want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,

that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.

I’m not the princess either.

Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

glass, but that comes later.

And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

shut up

I’m getting to it.

For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

and getting stabbed to death.

Okay, so I’m the dragon. Bid deal.

You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re

really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

Let me do it right for once,

for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

Hello darling, sorry about that.

Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

against a black sky prickled with small lights.

I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Crossed out.

Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

forgiven,

even though we didn’t deserve it.

Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up

in a stranger’s bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

darkness,

suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

smiling in a way

that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

I looked out the window and said

This doesn’t look that much different from home,

because it didn’t,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

We walked through the house to the elevated train.

All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

just couldn’t say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s

terrifying. No one

will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—

here’s the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

Jerusalem.

We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

the blue rings of my eyes as I say

something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

and the grains of sugar

on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry

it’s such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

we have had our difficulties and there are many things

I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

years later, in the chlorinated pool.

I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

these luxuries.

I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

I saw quite a number of familiar faces from CAP (Nicholas, Robert, Theophilus, and another councillor whose name I have forgotten). The entire setting was like that of CAP and it brought back so many memories. I really miss CAP days :/

Anyway, we were not expecting to win anything; at least I wasn't. I was just there to watch all the other participants perform. Winning was another matter. I really enjoyed myself watching all the other performances and they touched on some very interesting themes: Role of Women, Women in the Perspective of Men, 911 and well... Cake.