Discover Top Posts Tagged with #split no lightning

Supernova

I want to be an actress, and she wants to edit films, which says a lot about our relationship. We are both storytellers. I just need an audience, she just needs a keyboard, and we’ll both end up poor. I know calendars were invented to make the future feel familiar, To make days feel like degrees around a circle. But despite your gravity, our time together is not shaped like an orbit. You’re leaving. I’m not afraid of April or May. only the day that copper wire, purple lipstick and Starry Night stop being metaphors, so darling- I’ve made you something. I ask only for your ear in return. March. On the yesterdays I’m afraid of tomorrows, you say, “Today, I will love you forever.” When the tulips bloom, I’ll be in the closet, screen printing the future across one hundred Campbell’s soup cans. You’ll laugh, and say Rauschenberg is more my style. In the morning, I’ll think of Van Gogh’s ear, in transit to his ex-lover. Do you think it could hear the words of the other love poems in the mailman’s satchel? When the ground thaws, I’ll be frying chicken in my apartment. Come over, and I’ll teach you how I get the spices right- (The secret is no measuring spoons.) April. You gave me a bonsai sugar maple for Christmas, which refuses to grow, despite my best efforts. but I’ll keep misting the soil. When the temperature rises, I’ll envy the air for holding water, when our love cannot. When the ground sprouts infant weeds like whiskers, I'll stop shaving, in an attempt to make harmony with change. Our love has always been precocious. We cannot blame it for learning to run, we cannot save it from stumbling. May. Theatre is a protean effort, best-suited to the stories that flicker before our eyes. They leave behind no evidence. Film is an exercise in sculpting amber frames round the images worth preserving. Poetry is the mattress where love leaves ink-stains. I’ll let our love be a mattress. I’ll leave the recitation up to Rorschach. I‘ll demand nothing else from it, save for this: After the applause. When this poem has waned its way into a relic. Walk outside. Look at the stars. Remember that wherever there is light, there was once something burning. Unfold this poem. Resist the urge to squint. Fly this final page like a thought bubble. Let the light of bodies already departed fall across its face like a stray glance, a stray hair on a bed frame. Not a eulogy, not a history, just a poem. A mattress where love once left ink stains. by Hannah Van Sciver solo, EP Spring 2013 show: Split No Lightning

#supernova #poem #love poem #hannah van sciver #split no lightning #solo #spoken word #The Excelano Project #Excelano Project #excelano

Being Human

It’s probably not safe to eat a pomegranate when you’re falling in love. The choreography must get a little messy once you exist in the bed of a noun like that. And it’s probably not safe to toss the mattress to the floor to strip all the sheets, waking the word from his sleep & then ask him to slow dance between the two pantries of vowels in his kitchen, the mouth of the refrigerator’s door wide open & moaning. It’d be impossible for him to place one of his letters around your neck or a serif quivering beside your waist like a thumb that recognizes it’s tracing an old scab, because you are just a poet & he is just a word with no hands. So it’s probably not safe to give a noun like that a body or leave a word as tenderfoot & sloppy & terrifying as love to its own devices. Don’t expect him to sit idle in the house of your poem. He will grow outside the margins, design his legs like the fleeting ships of your father, the mimicry of a man who could only treasure you in the distance of oceans. And since it’s a little dangerous not knowing what it takes to own a body, This love —clumsy love, careful love, watch where you’re going, damnit love— will waltz all over your humanity, ask too many questions about the textual history between you & all those other words, why you have never written a poem for him. And it’s probably far from romantic for a poet to acknowledge her fear of a single word, which is too bad because love rarely looks this embarrassing & ridiculous. So if you are ever lucky enough to be dancing with a noun like that, in the kitchen of a curious love, a gargling toilet type love, a let’s fight like giraffes and make up love, a holy love, a love that has been blemished, tell him you are afraid. And when he asks you what it’s like being human let him spin you out & bring you in and while you’re learning how to write this poem love will be busy unbuttoning the pages of your shirt, unzipping your flesh, & flushing out all the particles of dirt, & sweat & shit & ugly that brought you into existence. Out loud, he’ll begin to read each name written on the lines of your lungs so he can know all the other nouns who built the cage around your hideous organ that’s begun to splatter its history all over the rug. When you look at the mess he has made out of you, at the inches of red, the instruments of all that human you’ve been itching in, be still. Let your skin blush in the inexplicable way only skin does when a soul rushes through the veins: Know that love is where you came from. Collapse into him as the first poet did with the first word, terrified & trembling as they were but still, both like a wreckage of angels dancing the day the other was born. by Victoria Ford Solo, Spring 2013, Split No Lightning

#victoria ford #Excelano Project #The Excelano Project #split no lightning #being human #love #love poem #spoken word #pomegranate

Muse For a Restless Leg

I have never written in a journal. Never leather-bound my thoughts between padlocked pages or left a cache of my writing, waiting like a crumpled prayer, to be discovered at a later date. Too often I write for the snaps, for the grease of applause, or the recognition of a stranger. But when no one is watching, what weight do these empty words hold? I have never loved— never let someone’s wish list front-cut my own, or looked at a girl, not with my eyes, but with my mind. Too often, I’ve wanted girls to like me more than I’ve wanted myself to like them, wanted her eyes to be two fun house mirrors to tell me I’m witty, to tell me I’m skinny, to tell me I’m worth something. But, tonight is different. I’ve spent three weeks now trying to write a poem for myself— not a “good” poem or a poem to be framed on a wall, but a true poem. And for three weeks now, I’ve tried not to write a poem about you— for the same reason my brother told me he’d never have a girl in his profile picture, and because you think my romance is full of shit anyways. But I write because it lets me be selfish. And for the first time in a long time, my self-interest has buoyed itself to another. I’ve seen myself rise when you rise, fall when you fall, and all I seem to want these days is to do nothing with you. Be a Sunday porch swing. Lets dangle our legs from the edge of your roof and go fishing for pennies on the sidewalk. We don’t have to make sense to get anywhere. Our days pass like summer minutes— at double time, but lingering like the last bite of a kiss. Tonight, you lie asleep in my bed, and I try to Sistine chapel your smile to my ceiling— one dimple still rests under your left cheek like the paint started running, like your last bite of watermelon was slightly too big and a little juice trickled down the side of your mouth. And although I’m dripping for you on this stage, I do the same when I’m alone. You’re more than just a girl I’m writing a poem about. The paint isn’t drying; The clock isn’t ticking. We’re just two kids running on a treadmill, admiring the scenery. Run at me blindfolded. Tell me that your elbow itches. Let me catch you. Let me be the answering machine for all your unimportant thoughts, for all the days that it seems easier to pull the covers over your head and pretend like the snooze button stopped time. Let me push you. Push me back. I don’t need to be the only kid on this swing set. I don’t need a muse for my restless legs. You don’t need a shot in the arm for your endless days, but it’s awful nice to have some company. It’s awful nice to save the last bite of dessert for someone you know is coming home. I’m not saving this poem for you. I’m saving it for me, so I can Poloroid this moment, tuck it under my pillow, and bring it out when no one is watching.

by Simone Stolzoff. Solo, Spring 2013: Split No Lightning

#simone stolzoff #The Excelano Project #Excelano Project #split no lightning #muse for a restless leg #love #love poem

Poems coming!

Over the next few days, we will be posting the text of the solos and short poems from Split No Lightning. Video will follow in the next few weeks!

#split no lightning #Excelano Project #The Excelano Project #excelano #spring show #poems #spoken word

An enormous thanks to everyone who came out to support this weekend at our spring show, Split No Lightning. Big love to the audience. Thanks for letting us share our words with you.

#Excelano Project #The Excelano Project #split no lightning #thank you #spoken word #UPenn #excelano

For the one with the brightest smile

Grief is a stomach expanding when there’s no food left in the house. You scrub dishes until there is nothing left to clean, until there is no more nail to chew down, until you are sitting inside a whale’s mouth surrounded by the sound of water. You contemplate the filling and refilling of the chest, how the hand that feeds can just as easily let you go hungry, if the child remembered to wish before he blew out the candle. You wave your hand like an open window, see snow in the middle of spring, consume every almond the shade of her skin as if there is meaning to be found. We found her hair clogging the drain on a Thursday night. On Friday, we kept our eyes open in the shower and pulled away fist fulls of black string from our scalps, not recognizing any of it as our own. Next Thursday you woke up in the house you grew up in. Your mother asked you if it was suicide. Your sister hugged you like she always does. You left the bed unmade like you always do. After the phone call, you ate cookies with your best friends and cried into tea cups. When there was no more water left in your body, you went home and nursed your swollen eyes. And when you felt yourself being dragged through the streets, you smashed your fingers into the pavement only to watch them turn to chalk, only to cough out apologies like a line of ants, following you home, swarming around your prayers, reminding you there is no rest to be found. And when everything has shattered, you will wish for lightning to split the truth, you will wish the sky to peel back like tide and pull you in. Maybe then you’ll find yourself in a room filled with answers. Yesterday, my mother asked me again if I ever found out what really happened. For the first time I realized I’m okay with not knowing. I do not know each name of loss, how to forgive the men who kiss without permission, how to heal with so many sharp things in sight. But a splinter growing into our heels, will find a home in our steps, in the way we begin to notice the slip of space between fabric and skin, in how we find ourselves looking less into mirrors and more into the faces of ones we love.

#The Excelano Project #Spring 2013 #Poetry #Spoken Word #Split No Lightning #Grief

1 Down, 1 to Go!

Thanks to everyone who came out last night to Split No Lightning! Tonight, we do it all again. Don't miss the last Excelano Project show of the year!