I am very excited for the pending release of my first book, The Dark Side of the Divine, a collection of poetry that explore the turbulance of being a woman, a first responder. Check back for additional info on pre-sales and the release date! Unil then, enjoy:
Storyteller
I am a storyteller
not a writer or poet or painter or bard
I belong around a fire
with unruly children at my feet,
in a tribal circle
I am a mediocre version
of Socrates under a tree
My genre is the aesthetic
my form, the rise and fall of the voice,
the ebb and flow of the theme and metaphor,
the passion of my ancestors,
the stories of my people whittled and modeled
like wood left in the rain swelling with each retelling
always true to the spirit of the teller
it is pressed charcoal
or oil paint (some shade of umber)
staining fingers
it is wispy lines on a blank canvas
and music and silence and wind in the leaves,
the bubbling of water as the river flows endlessly
to wherever it goes,
like a story unfolds
I am a storyteller
no iteration of Guttenberg can print me,
no illumination can recreate me
no blinking cursor
drowning in blue light and pixels
my words are not confined
by Webster and Roget’s
fuck the grammar of the lingua franca
I am not cheapened by the limitations of typeset and font,
by margins and pages and chapters and volume
no editor will scratch red carets and slashes and notes
in my margins.
I breathe
I pulse
and not like the cursor in its little box,
I will be no slave to the forum,
or feed
or clips
or reel.
You should take great care not to cheapen me,
by placing value in my silence
for I will find a different ear,
even if it must be a tree, a squirrel, or the stars…
I cannot be frozen and fixed in books of myth and legend,
or runes or pictograph
with those things you cut off my voice
and the stories will die
as the stories of all the ancients have died before me.
I am a yarn in a blanket of threads
woven by generations of storytellers
and carefully stitched
and loved and wrapped up
and passed on through spoken language,
the oral histories of the universe,
not a tweet or a snap
or even all of the tomes of all of the greatest libraries
They could never hold me
or any card catalog
or microfiche
or Google.
None will ever hold the power
or capture all of the words
and nuance of the storyteller
For I am a storyteller,
and I will no longer be ashamed by it.