Have you never felt around the base of your skull,
rooted through your baby hairs, your kitchen–
the living room of your release–
split open your skin and just crawled from beneath it?

Have you  never hung up your loose corpse.
Let it drape upon the skeletons in your closet
and just let your soul disperse in the air?
Let it float, undulating
as though by way of osmosis
through poetry and prose.

As April, our national poetry month, rolls into May, and May gives way to the seniors’ graduation from this space to the next, I cannot help but feel nostalgia crawl up my throat and choke me once in awhile. I cannot help but look through past yearbooks, get weepy at the tune of classic graduation songs, and–more productively–become reflective over the practice and experience within and without the walls of this ‘Model Home’ which have helped me survive and let me grow—poetry.
And when I say poetry, I don’t mean the sterilized and structured art form which is pervasive within our hyper-colonized community, but rather poetry as the expository medium of self-expression and self-exploration. I mean the catalyst by which the chaos roiling inside of my body makes its great escape and manifests in the minds of others. I mean the great release—the childish, the natural.
After joining our school’s Slam Poetry team my freshman year, I began to identify as a poet, which was prompted by the realization that I could no longer identify as a child. To me, being a poet is as close as adults can get to being as honest and, ironically, as brilliant as children are.
What is important about childhood and poetry is that they are, if done right, so deeply revelatory that they expose those feelings hidden past the veil of my impressionable conscious and straight into my ‘gut’—my conscience. I began writing poetry to save my gut from the grips of adulthood, not to say that adults have no conscience but simply that children’s are without filter, and there is something beautiful about that–something poetic.
I think that we live in a culture that does not value the intelligence borne solely out of childhood, the time before we are so deeply colonized that we forget who we are.  It is for that same reason that we live in a culture that has reduced poetry to a luxury and does not acknowledge it as a practice vital to our survival as a people.

To become colonized as a people in the way that I am referencing is to become dissociated from our deepest emotions and truths—our guts. It is to assimilate into the environment around us in a manner that makes a mockery of our personal ethical codes. It is to assimilate into the environment around us in which, as Audre Lorde beautifully writes, “we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.”  

To become colonized is to give into the learned process of forgetting ourselves. And it is through poetry that I do believe we are able to begin the process of unlearning.
So this column is written in defense of poetry, as a statement that poetry is, or rather can be, appreciated and, more accurately, felt as more than simply a sterilized art form, but instead: a midwife which brings forth and unpacks our most previously unexamined emotions.
My favorite essay is by Audre Lorde, a self-identified ‘warrior poet.’ The essay is named “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” and this column draws heavily from it. Lorde writes that in an American culture (of which Parker takes great part) which relies “solely upon ideas” to live by, which relies upon the concept that “I think therefore I am,” we often forget to qualify the concept, that perhaps the sentiment should be “I feel, therefore I can be free.” Poetry, she argues, allows us to dig deep into our true selves and the gut feelings that we sense that we have been trained to abandon in the name of Eurocentric and capitalistic models of ‘productivity’ and ‘design thinking.’
So I urge us in the Parker community to write more, whether you be literarily inclined or not, because poetry can come from writings that we least expect it to—an essay, a scribble, a journal entry, a song or a Snapchat. And it is important, I think, to catalogue that which transpires in our life, and to unpack it as it comes, lest we be overwhelmed by our own requiems and let them eat us whole.

Especially now that I prepare to graduate, I feel that without the markers, the poems both shared and kept private that I have left dancing in my wake over the past 4 years, I wouldn’t be as grounded, as reflective, as happy, as I am now. So thank you to those who urged me to write and to breathe, and thank you to those who, in reading my column, might sit down and write a poem.