This weeks Poem of the Week: "The Future"
Neil Hilborn, performing at the 2013 National Poetry Slam in Cambridge, MA
Neil Hilborn is by far one of my favorite slam poets. I feel his work is always honest and it comes from personal experience. Personally I relate to a lot of his pieces. I actually suffer from severe anxiety and moderate/mild depression. This poem means a lot to me. When I first heard it, I actually broke down crying in my room. There gets to a point in this poem where he talks about wanting to kill himself - and when I first heard this poem, those types of thought were weighing extremely heavy in my mind. After listening to this poem, something broke inside of me and I knew that things would be okay despite the fact that everything really sucked then (and even now. Granted I'm at the college of my dreams - but that's a story for another day). Whenever I have a panic attack, sometimes if my clarity/sanity isn't completely gone, I'll repeat and excerpt from this poem. Here it is:
"The point is, here is a list of things my brain has told me to do: join a cult; start a cult; become a cabinet maker; kill myself, so, in essence, become a cabinet maker; break into, and then paint, other people's houses; have sex with literally everyone who reminds me of my mother; fight people who are much fightier than me, like the cops, so, in essence, kill myself. I think a lot about killing myself, not like a point on a map but rather like a glowing exit sign at a show that's never been quite bad enough to make me want to leave. See, when I'm up I don't kill myself because, holy shit, there's so much left to do. When I'm down I don't kill myself because then the sadness would be over, and the sadness is my old paint under the new. The sadness is the house fire or the broken shoulder: I'd still be me without it but I'd be so boring... I know tomorrow is going to come because I've seen it. Sunrise is going to come, all you have to do is wake up. The future has been at war, but it's coming home so soon... I saw the future, I did, and in it, I was alive."
And that's it.
I'm alive. You're alive. We're living in a shitty world together and that's okay. We'll figure it out eventually.
Have a great day guys.