My First Slam Poetry

I am most certainly not a poet. I can write anything else – essays, stories, dialogue – but I’ve never been prone to poetry. I’ll even admit, it has been frustrating, especially when I would watch two girls in my creative writing class completely nail slam poetry. Our entire class would erupt into applause – or rather, snaps – whenever they would finish reading some emotional or inspirational poem. I was jealous, to say the least. How could these two girls whom I had considered close friends of mine be so in touch with their emotions that they were able turn their feelings into words that left half the class crying and the other half in an existential crisis? Could language really be that powerful? Could I even figure out how to use my words like that? I didn’t know that it was easier than I thought, and I didn’t know that language was at my disposal in ways I couldn’t even imagine.

I dreaded it going into it, but I knew the basic steps and realistically, I didn’t need to be good at it. I had a hundred in the class anyway (everyone did.) I just needed to get through it. I thought about what I was passionate about. Books, movies, and TV shows, of course, but I had to go deeper. I thought about my future, and my feelings on said subject. They were grim, to say the least. Most panicking teenagers trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their life tend to have gloomy thoughts. I decided to start it off with “When I Grow Up…” From there, I was on a roll. And before I knew it, I had written my first slam