Literacy Narrative
Play the sound file to hear my journey into literacy, as a series of spoken word pieces. If you are unable to listen to the sound file, you can read the transcription below.
Transcription:
Prologue
Literally, a literacy
Written in 600 stolen books.
Good Night Moon
In an unincorporated suburb
With no library. Scary
How purloined pages
Set stages
For dissociative drama.
As such,
Chapter 1
I was adopted at birth
into an atmosphere
Of thrifty Republicans & football.
Whose call
Was it to let me get so damn
Obsessed with Bunnicula?
Well played, talking animals made
Up most of my repertoire until grade
Nine, rise and shine.
Middle class but
Last in class
When it came to math.
Who knew?
Chapter 2
Reading way above grade level
To bevel
The edges of the screams in my house.
The discourse of dissociation
Constant on the radio station.
Read a book in math class
Barely pass
Get a tutor, some recruiter
Coaching me through the numbers.
I have never gotten better
Than a C in algebra or trigonometry,
but letters? Much better, you see
Chapter 3
The landmine of undiagnosed ADHD.
My Brother was diagnosed, but not me.
Left to languish in the corner like a succulent:
Never thriving, but never dying
Enough to warrant attention.
The invention
Of a literary kleptomania.
Continue to dissociate from trauma
By reading two books a week, seek
Solace in stories. Burn your way
Through the entire school library. Take
Matters into your own hands.
Steal six grand
Worth of merchandise from a Barnes & Noble over the course
Of four years: my fears
That I am the reason the bookstore later closed.
My mind tries not to go through that door,
Chapter 4
Senior year of high school,
And some fool
Let me enroll in 5 English classes.
I pulled some tricks:
GPA from a 2.1 to a 3.6.
My own column in the school paper,
Felt high as a skyscraper,
Look Ma, I’m worth something
But parental attention tapered
After the brother’s second suicide attempt. I do not resent
His suffering, just my own stuntedness.
With little light I grew
In a community college bathroom,
Like a sickly office pothos doomed
To never get fluent in any language
Other than my own.
Somehow, still alive,
Chapter 5
High school Spanish, hellish
Enough to scare me off spoken language.
Seems to me my fluency
In ASL is imperfect but functional.
My Spanish was transactional–
Sufficient cognates in the wordy risk
Of the Filipino casino to get the gist
Of enough of my partner’s language
To make bad bilingual puns with Nanay & Tatay
Though I’ll likely never learn their Waray-Waray.
Just for kicks,
Chapter 6
Go to University to get a job, rob
Myself of prospects, major in English.
Distinguish
My resume with the characteristics
Of an MA in linguistics.
White savior, do a favor
To the Natives–study Apsaalooke, aka Crow
& you know
my professor was a white man
I don’t understand
How he ran the Crow Summer Institute,
Signal of a language robbed destitute
As a sea of brown faces
Tried to learn their own language
As it rolled off his white tongue.
I got an internship, went
To the Tsleil Waututh Nation
To help the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ situation.
See the everyday tragedies on the reservation.
Realized I was too much of a pansy to handle it.
Good lord in heaven,
Chapter 7
Discover the typewriter, pull all-nighters
Clacking, clacking, clacking.
Start a business selling poems on the street,
Get your feet
Wet, bet
Typewriter poetry will pay all your bills
For the next 3 years. Skills
Enough to go back to school in your thirties, dirty
From too long out of academia. Suffering anemia
No longer fluent in the language
Of gatekeepers and minesweepers
Who use six syllable words to keep out
The stupid people and the poor people and the brown people.
If the ivory tower is a steeple, then fuck this church.
(I say even as I wear its merch.)
Why do these fucking windbags
speak in ways no one understands??
The carrot and the stick, I’m a parrot in the thick
Of it.
I keep company with sex workers, commies, & circus freaks
I am an anti-establishment anarchist who somehow creeped
Their way back in. The democracy of hypocrisy.
I know this was a slog,
Epilogue
My karma is as unclean as a seagull
All the illegal
Shelters made of stories I stole.
I dug a hole
And then climbed out on the clout
Of a not-quite-trilingual shout.’
My saving grace was selling my poetry
As a commodity.
If we make our own meaning
Then what do you make of this?