Penn’s premier spoken word collective is having its spring show this coming weekend! Do not miss your chance to come out and see the sickest display of filthy poetic awesomeness in the western hemisphere!

Tickets on the walk every day starting Monday. Pick em up early because they will sell out!

April 2 & 3 @ 8pm
Dunlop Auditorium
$8 on the walk
$10 at the door
$9 ONLINE

i know one day you will unlearn the algebra of his face. on nights when insomnia jackknifes its way across your eyelids, you will unfeel the cold in its blade.

its been three years. you’ve been trying to find a wrinkle of rainbow in your bruises, a rainbow you swear he put there back when he’d look at you that way. eyes clinging, he is chewing gum.

and sometimes your footsteps lose themselves in translation, but i know you’ll leave him. i know you’ll find your eyes again. you used to sing from the green melting into your pupils, there were mockingbirds there. you marooned them on a question mark two years ago. they’re silent, but i hear them smiling. breasts bursting like banana trees on fire and a song in undertow. they haven’t died yet.

I could tell you how I saltwater traipsed
across you. Shimmering shoreline of a man.
Afraid of sidling past your limbs. Sinking in.
I could tell you of cardboard boxed daydreams
graying under floorboards of doubt.
I could tell you how I tiptoed.

I could tell you of the casualties.
How I’ve seen one too many woman
bend her bones for your kind.
Cracked Corinthian columns,
pockmarked spines.

I could tell you of a Saturday afternoon stroll,
my Fifth Avenue vertigo. Seeing swingsets
in unassuming sidewalks.
How your eyes were auburn dust bowls.
Mine, two Georgia sun-blackened
farmers fleeing.
Adhering to street signs,
avoiding stoplights–
their speckled hearts bungeeing
into puddles of green,
I could tell you of falling like that.

I could tell you of trying to keep composed,
of being daughter to a six foot brick wall.
How I’m still mortaring the cavities.
How in ten New York City blocks
I unlearned the difference
between walking and flight.
Heels trampolining into concrete.
The flailing of a footstep.

Get your minds and bodies ready for the first spoken word poetry show of the year from the sickest poetry group on the planet. The Excelano Project is kicking it off early this year with a continuation of last year’s EP Underground Tour to raise money for our November show.

As usual we’re bringing a sick set of Excelano poetry and we’re opening up the stage for all our unsigned Penn/Philly talent to join in with the fun. Also, the night will be a special HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY to David ‘Bless’ Warner, one of EP’s finest.

Free to enter, definitely donate if you want, but most importantly just come and enjoy your show.

Excelano hopefuls are recommended to come and get some exposure on the open mic before auditions this Sunday!

http://www.dopesickness.com

today is clearly not a beach day because i’m the only person here,
i guess Monday boxed everyone into suits and ties
and the workweek isn’t over
but the earth doesn’t dance to the thumping of their calendar
or bop to the ticking of their mass-produced clocks
it’s only Wednesday because they say it is
and i’d rather be deaf with two left feet
even if it means i’m lonely and the other kids won’t play with me—-
today,
i’ve got my own sandbox
reconstruct memories in hand castles
collect sea shells the shape of nostalgia
swim in my father’s tears and wish he believed in the glory of a high tide
uncrumple my mother’s broken down spine
with seaweed that i stretch to the sky
and my first love is two baby crabs upside down
that look like blood red hearts beating side by side
new and uncertain against grains of flesh
cuz our butterflies haven’t migrated away for the winter yet.

i’ve never needed church or religion, and I’m only 19
but these days I find myself – palms pressed,
knees itching to genuflect, and
wondering if God has gills
if he can carry downpours on his shoulders
swallow the sea and never choke on his own sanity-
i’m wishing for a rainbow sign
but the floods only multiply with age and time
someone up there spits on my white flag and mocks my flailing hands
as if to say i should have learned to swim or pray before Judgment Day.
friends are not fish, after all
and love is not a lighthouse…
so when trust becomes a sinking ship,
i go down with it–
hope can only float so long
until the bubbles burst into
angels’ breath and i’ve just got foam and fantasy left.

i’ve learned to count on nothing
but an unyielding past and my mother’s cracked fingers
but today, i have the beach to cradle me-
i sift through her for olive leaves
the waves tumble like sapphire bass beats
the seagulls…they’re just Miles Davis on a bad day
my footprints Sketch Flamenco in the sand
and the sky looks Kind of Blue
infinite like something i’d jump into
i’ve always wanted to get behind the horizon
see if shit is brighter on the other side
wonder what i’d find if the ocean and the sky
could stop lovin’ just long enough for me
to unseal their lips and jump into that space
once benighted by their kiss.
and i know
it’s only been three minutes
and that’s the third time i’ve used love as a metaphor
to describe things that are so – far – away
but i need to believe it exists somewhere -
so dear beach,
here’s my message in a bottle-
i pray that some people can be mermaids
breathe life into the rest of us
whose lungs may crumble under the brutal tentacles of time,
i pray that little girls can find glass slippers and pearls in your arms,
that i can grow old as your sands and still push the tide from my back
and that tomorrow,
someone else will find this.

…I don’t really know what you think of me…
can’t quite sense the heat behind your lantern smile,
so if you won’t use its flicker to guide me,
I hope you don’t mind if I inch in a little bit closer.
See, I’d like to believe that real-life love must be as simple as it is for those two lovers,
storybook ending etched lifeline deep into Father Time’s palms-
but poets are only good at reading passion in pages and song
so hopeless romantic that I may be,
I can’t seem to read your mixed signals
no matter how often I play them on repeat.
I’ve been in love twice,
and learned that love is a four-ton pendulum
that sways to the fickle eight-count of two heartbeats
only to be knocked off-balance by distance or mistrust or wild oat sowing
or all of that other bullshit
that’s made every relationship I’ve ever witnessed
dangle precariously in the balance-
love, pendulum that it is,
but I’m just looking for someone to stand still with.

You…frighten me,
you hide behind jigsaw puzzle eyes,
you…with your ribs as window blinds-
I’ve never met a flower so afraid of the sun,
come undone,
be an unraveled stem -
spill the cherry blossoms from your gut
like red wine leaking from a paper cup-
’cause I know love comes and goes like the seasons,
but it’s springtime…
this mid-April breeze is feisty,
rustling its way through our clothes a little bit inappropriately.
The sun is shining like she’s got electromagnetic mascara for rays,
and I could have sworn, this morning, she batted her eyelashes your way.
It’s a time for flirting–
heartbreak and fear were so last season,
so today, I just wanna hold your hand.
Let’s be kids again, cavalier, unafraid of anything
but our own reflections in the mirror-
we’ll pretend its prom night,
and we’re fashionably late to a red carpet of rose petals,
firefly strobe lights and a dance floor of clementines.
Let me fashion my lips as rock climbers,
and I’ll scale the ridges of your cheekbones
then lay softly in the willow hammock of your dimples.
I just want to bite into this awkward silence like an overripe peach,
and have all those nervous conversations that we’ll laugh at when we’re thirty
and you’ve memorized the freckle coordinates on my skin,
and I’ve played cartographer to you,
mapped your blue Nile veins
and that meteorite scar tissue you keep shrouded
from every stranger in your stratosphere.

I’ve circumnavigated you for months,
but there’s something empty about living weightless -
so if you see a satellite in your skyline,
it’s me— I’m tired of hovering.
Just about ready for that quantum leap
so orient me,
compass-rose kiss a bag of wind in my direction.
Have it whistle me an opera.