One More Cliche

Here is a spoken word poem I wrote, and you need to imagine an impassioned speaker delivering it, maybe over a beat. I don’t know, I like to think of it on its own. I wrote this because defeat is something we all experience, but the word itself is meaningless. I think it’s more a process of recreation. Deconstruction, recreation, where you become greater after assessing what it is that allowed you to be deconstructed. And your pieces have developed a resistance or resilience to everything that damages you until you are unstoppable.

But that is an active process, it isn’t just a “Let me lie here and wait to die” kind of passive process. A lot of people expect to be given the right to withstand pressure. Like everything else, you need to fight for every inch you gain. Through constant struggle, the natural law of nature, you become stronger. And that is basically what this poem is about.

In a sense, it is about the, now clichéd, Phoenix. Hence the title.

The Phoenix

The man is never defeated.
The man is never defeated.
He is simply reborn.

He considers himself a finite entity that exists outside the boundaries of eternity, because synthetics, arithmetic and cold metallic brick have shrouded his empathy for nature.

He tends to wager with regression as he looks at depression with fear and uncontrollable anxiety. Lacking piety he throws himself down into pits full of wolves and seals his own tomb, asking god to return him to the womb.

‘He’ is a man that gets angry in life and love because ‘he’, the man, is a failure. Untailored to such complex systems and vindictive vixens vying for his sexual attention. They confuse and clutter him with sexual muttering and feints and twists, clouding mist all to make him play a game for which he is untrained and in which there is nothing to gain.

He.
The man.
Is a failure.

And through all his struggles he looks back at his prior victories with contempt and shouts along trajectories of “That was nothing.” With a rancid scent, his words fall like knives of angry wives “I survived no better than an infant.” And in that instant the man begins to crumble like he really was nothing, rejecting the world’s offering and accepting suffering.

And the man, without guidance and no longer the arbiter of the growing silence, finds no answer in soliloquies of solitude. He knows that fate, he can no longer elude, and the encroaching frost that crawls up his spine and reverberates the sensation of being used over and over again intertwines with memories of a childhood that never felt true. This man was broken to begin with, why should anyone bother to make him their brother or a person to live with!

So, now a dimwit, and having failed to become the Alpha Male, he lives life like the outcast. A condition worsened by being downcast, forced to endure the exterior boundaries of personal interaction, and emotional inaction. Not party to any one group, lacking the powers of attraction, more unsure and out of the loop, the man, with no traction, falls.

And so, like a broken faucet, he drips his optimism and hides it in an emotional closet. Unsure as to what token caused it. What. Caused. This? This feeling of emptiness and repetition. The jaded inhibitions of a man that made it all the way to middle age and never once felt the gentle hand of his one love true assuage all his slowly building anxieties on his mission.

Like antibodies for the flu, the man, who’s community stacks against him, stands against him and now resents him. For he, the unmalleable product of lifetimes of cultural genocide and apologies implied by those standing beside him, was created at whim and unsuited for the culture of Yin. The man that does not fit into convenient categories becomes an allegory for the foreign, the unknown, the alien. This man is salient, unique, but nobody has the strength to seek the knowledge he offers, instead too weak to break open the coffers they pry. Hateful, wide-eyed and bleak.

Murder, despair and ignorant conservatives disparage his marriage to the land and the only guiding hand that holds him firmly to ground. And that crushing sound of failure, misery and sheep-minded bigotry brings the unique talents of ‘He’ to rest with the best of cultural dysentery!

The murdered artist, thinker and fighter. The warrior, that died at the hands of the Whiter. The man begins to decay like he never believed that he could. Because immortals and beasts don’t deserve the undying feast of the departed who’s body, cold-hearted now rests at the feet of the King of the Dead. While the long, thin fingers that tap away at his head lay this shape of a man to his spiritual bed.

The man was never defeated. He was only beaten until his body, all damaged and bloody returned to the ground to be cycled around like the repetitive sound, cry or other that comes from a baby calling it’s mother. The man was never defeated! He was simply burned at the stake, ostracized and raped until his body hung limp in the wind and desecrated, ashamed and still in the flame he was turned to a seed that would grow like a weed but beautiful as sin.

And one day this man will be reborn during the storm of cultural revolution. He will rush forward, like catalytic evolution, as he feels the warm summer rain crush and explode on his face. And through all of his pain he will further his race as he charges the gates of oppression, ostracism and sexual regression. The man will be stronger, smarter and loved in his time. He will burn armies and speak without faltering rhyme, more inebriating than barrels of wine, his words will reach millions and span eons this time.

This man was not defeated. He was not destroyed. He was an incorruptible, impervious void who struggled to become a splinter in the side of winter as he summoned the fury and light of generations enduring the jury of synthetic mentality canceling beauty. He fought with nothing but purity ‘till his death, and wrestled his sanity until his body was shattered into the winds and scattered. He picked up his pieces in the land of the spirits and for every mistake that he made he would summon increases in resolve and his power to evolve until he was much more than a man, he was a tower.

Impenetrable and untouchable.
The man is never defeated.
The man is never defeated!
The man is never defeated!
He is simply reborn.