There's a lot of poetry going around.

[in_the_blue]

Some of you might really like this book I own called The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. The review on Amazon says From the Beat poetry of the '50s to the spoken word of today, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers. Like Donald Allen's epochal New American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible will serve as a primer for generational revolt and poetic expression, and is an enduring document of the visionary tradition of authenticity and nonconformity in literature. This exuberant manifesto includes lives of the poets, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs of clubs and cafes, interviews, and, above all, the poems.

I love this book. Here, have Lineage by slam poet Jeffrey McDaniel.

When I was little, I thought the word loin
and the word lion were the same thing.

I thought celibate was a kind of fish.

My parents wanted me to be well-rounded
so they threw dinner plates at each other
until I curled up into a little ball.

I've had the wind knocked out of me
but never the hurricane.

I've seen two hundred and sixty-three rats
in the past year, but never more than one at a time.
It could be the same rat, with a very high profile.

I know what it's like to wear my liver on my sleeve.

I go into department stores, looking suspicious,
approach the security guard and say
what, what, I didn't take anything.
Go ahead. Frisk me, big boy!

I go to the funerals of absolute strangers
and tell the grieving family: the soul of the deceased
is trapped inside my rib cage
and trying to reach you.

Once I thought I found love, but then I realized
I was just out of cigarettes.

Some people are boring because their parents
had boring sex the night they were conceived.

In the year thirteen hundred and thirteen,
a little boy died, who had the exact same scars as me.