Slouching Towards Oakland

Download the MP3 here: http://mattswriting.com/music/

Here's a freestyle poem I put together, with many references to William Butler Yeats, among other things.

Features the instrumental from "Lost" by Coldplay. Note: I made this mix before Jay-Z came out with his hip hop remix of Coldplay.

The first two lines of the poem are by Joe Sciarrillo and his housemates.

The Lyrics:


"I'll tell you what the Queen saw/I was cuckolded by my princess when out eating quinoa//"
Let me show ya//
I be like Jack Black with Mos Def as my chauffeur//
Driving Miss Daisy crazy//
"Hella Hella Hyphy" in Keak da Sneak's voice//
Yo DJ, 'Be Kind Rewind'//
I'ma bout to spit my mind//
About Jack B. Yeat's "Men of Destiny" painting;//
and what it meant to me//
Theorists say 'Suburbanism has an inherent lack of identity'//
But I differ to beg,//
With my bootleged DJ Matt Werner mixtape,//
Surrounded by Scots in class with forests of hands//
No Ira Glass; Terry Gross is not in this Fresh Air//
No longer by, does the day go, without people rep'n Stirling and Glencoe instead of HP and Vallejo.//
Sitting on my front porch//
Overlooking the Firth of Forth,//
I take the fifth about what's the meaning of this.//
I never know what it meant to me//
The Hyphy Movement was "an ever-widening gyre" "full of passionate intensity"//
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the" streets//
Women and men holler my name like "Stella" in A Street Car Named Desire//
Some call me Paulie Bleeker; others, the Young MacGyver//

After women who're all meat and potatoes, and a bit saucy//
Dropn rhymes with J-Scril, since before You Shall Know Our Velocity//
And Lil Jon's memoir, What is the "Whaaat?"//

Today, I saw strollers strewn in the street//
Using language for which there is no original referent//
Meaning resides somewhere between synthesizer and synthesized//
A modern-day Modernist surrounded by men who did it all for the nookie//
With lives spent on Wikipedia looking up whats a wookiee.//
I was depressed into this consciousness when Arnold took Tookie.//
And still I do not know how I got there.//
I woke up this morning to find myself in A Scot's Quair//
Like Lewis Grassic Gibbon's classic.//
After college, people told me one word: "Plastics."//
But a mold is not what I'm meant for.//

With weighty words that bend the spines of books//
I look for meaning where no one else looks//
So when scholars finally untangle my flow//
They will see that the stage to me, is like scaffolding to Michelangelo.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Oakland
• poetry
• spoken
• word
• william
• butler
• yeats
• second
• coming

[NatalieNarchotic]

wow...

[hobbzy1]

'So when scholars finally untangle my flow//

They will see that the stage to me, is like scaffolding to Michelangelo.' Great stuff Matt.