{firemouth poets in the Ace Deuce as it were}

I'd like to condense my thoughts on the week in Ann Arbor with these crazy wonderful teenagers before the thoughts dissipate entirely as those brain cells are usurped by memorization of this work I have to perform in a week

these teenagers, these poets becoming more themselves by the minute like some mad morphing, every exercise a cosmic jump and forward or back, it's movement all the time

such a joyride, this time when the writing is so new and malleable, that less step by step advancement than the work moving in leapfrogs and quantum jumps that land us so often in strange and dangerous, though gorgeous, territory

of course, with no clear path to look back on, it can be hard to stay in the further place (isn't it always, though,) so much backsliding is likely before foothold is found

and then as we become such good conduits for the poems, telling the Truth gets overwhelmingly scary - so we learn to obscure, to drape the perfectly flawed body of the Poem with gauzy non-specific metaphor, shift the lens to soft-edged with tiptoeing language that dazzles and blurs and keeps us what feels like a safe distance from the firebreathing organ that is the poem's heart spewing Truth

so we comb through the poem like a thrift store, like Value World or the Salvation Army, hunting the images that are us, that say Buy Me I'm Yours, I am You / and it's honest and only you could wear that orange straw cowboy hat, that child's t-shirt that says I'm Special, that pair of plaid pants with the butterfly patch

but it's scarier than that sometimes, sometimes it's the back room that beckons, the store room a jumble of stuff upon stuff and it's the sorting, the finding, the sitting cross-legged in the middle and rocking the doll you forgot you lost or the ring that never left your grandfather's hand

and these poets found all of that, sifted through and handed to the page miracles of imperfect sound, becoming and becoming and becoming / so well