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Picture This
Picture This:
Loud, pumping music floods the room, then BOOM-
There he stands.
A heaving, deceiving, thieving black cloud of soot and emptiness follows him,
With a face like a familiar tomb.
My tomb.
What could it be? Why is he approaching me?
Who could this burning human-being come to be?
Picture this:
My isolation thickens like dingy pond water
Desolation, desperation, separation
Where did the party go?
Blackness clouds the swamp that is my mind,
Sends frogs and flies leaping and buzzing away
Away to stay.
I try to hide inside but sometimes
My reality defies it.
Picture this:
His eyes on fire, approaching closer, closer towards me
No one around me knows it but
I am frozen,
Cold and stiff as a corpse as
He tries to hold me close but
He also doesn't know me or where I have been hiding
because
I am gone.
I am down a sewer drain where there is nothing,
Nothing for me to explain.
Is it pain? Am I sane? Should I run away in shame?
Picture this:
A million trembling fingers trace my skin like knives,
An unlicensed gun of silence between us pointed at my head
BOOM.
He spells out his wrongdoing like
An encyclopedia, yet never reads the very pages
He has written.
I’m still inside myself but he has
Nothing to hide as he
Tries to climb inside me too.
He shines like an explosion and I am thrown astray
I cannot stay
I cannot stay
I cannot stay but
I cannot run, nowhere to turn because
My brain is grey water, blurred, his words are slurred,
“Lets dance,” he spits lava but instead
I’d rather be dead.
Picture this:
The gavel hits hard mahogany as the jury
Plunges embers down my throat
I choke on smoke as they skim his twisted words and announce
“Not Guilty.”
My lungs fill with flames as they say
What should've happened
What I saw
What he did
Where I hid away.
In a whirlpool of regret I sit
“Should have gotten a rape kit”, they ooze
And I am flushed away again in
Their spit.
Picture this:
This was all in my head
Her head
His head
Their heads
OUR heads.
Do you believe that one bit?
Fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers
Cousins, family and lovers.
We are burned by the touch, the grab, the grope of
Sexual assault.
But we are also
Setting fire to the waving white flags
Above our nation.
We’ve painted a pretty picture, re-read every letter.
Now we have to start again, and paint it better.
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This poem originated from a slam poem activity in school. For some reason, slam poetry has always seemed so interesting and eclectic to me, so that is what I chose. I chose a topic that I am very passionate about, which is sexual assault and harrassment. The narrator of my poem is a victim, and I used metaphor to represent them as water, cool and calm, and the harasser as fire, burning and overpowering, but also surprisingly bright as in intelligent. I also used repetition with “picture this” to remind the reader to take close notice. All in all, I really like the slam poem that I wrote and I hope that my readers do too! The message is close to my heart.