 Welcome everyone to Level Up. I'm very happy and excited for what's happened in the short time that we've been together. Thank you so much to all our guest poets for coming and giving your experience, giving your care, showing your hearts to us. Thank you to the students for being brave and for trying new things. My name is Joy Jimenez and I'm the organizer of this first series and it's been great. And so today what we're going to see is the result of that, the fruition of coming together. And I'm really excited that it's happening on this side of town, the far west side, because there needs to be more arts education and spoken word over on this side of town. So this feels like a seed to me. And so our poets and our artists will be introducing themselves and will be coming to the mic to give their original work. And so thank you for being a good audience and thank you for being here today. And so I welcome our first songwriter and composer to the mic, Sean Wesley Sitten. And we get the mic ready for him. I didn't think of it lately but I wrote a couple things this week and nothing really like has been working out really. So I'm just following myself. And I got this and I was making payments on it. That's a different animal. And we're like finger picked animals. These dreams are cruel jokes Maffin and Maff sorry I'm too comfortable The garden from the tree is the broken Because the seed was planted in the garden of regret and resentment And at first appearance you really don't notice They're kind of shuffled up Because it's been a while since this tree got water The gardener did come back around from natural causes within the ground That's why the fruit is really rotten Although it looks good leftovers to the dogs under the table That escaped from the garden of current blemishes and rips divided out Because although they wondered off They did nothing wrong And they've always been innocent When I brushed up to the garden of progression and fulfillment But what I left behind is what I really bought with you to make this move Oh I first thought it was true Then I realized it was the right thing to do I got planted next to General Sherman But nothing general about the Sherman tree Showed me the pawn to decide your tricks Told me how to drink Wonderful thing until the pawn got dragged And sure you cut it down I think I put it all together Oh I'm still a dreamer But all this time I've been drinking empty water Trying to quit because I'm dehydrated Mentally migrated and last night it worked So whether I'm tripping and intoxicated Like either I'm tripping and intoxicated Or the history I know fails a repetition But even though I'm sober minded This hurt has got me lifted Because now I'm in a contradiction And these stars got me wishing I'd find a host to be filled up by And the cast won't fit I could fill it up with solver That's easy to do When I called to play the day before tomorrow The water was flowing and the taste was pure But contaminated When it got here that the mouth's about to taste Breasted off conniving waves Airbrushed pain The artist got parts drunk Everything he reached didn't water the seed And properly trained with horrible tears And so I gotta find out Is the one to play The one drinking empty water Only trying to maintain Or the one who Unattentionally drunks the way I'll make it back to that garden one day And truly find out how the root didn't fade Though I'm from the tree after broken I control my own fruit And will build my own garden He's pitching the picture Just to strike out the frame And crop up the imperfection So it can permanently hang I guess this ego's luck ran dry When he backed into debt And couldn't fly from the scene Was plugged in but not connected Now Ted's vibe is on his knees Cause now we have alarm clocks places to beat And people to meet So they can hear him speak But it's only empty words There's nothing to return But I really like that poem, sir But if they only knew The show that he used Was to dig up memories I shouldn't stay buried Till you live moments When he's on that platform He'd point to empty sea To put his father in Cause he hasn't been around For a while now Then after the show It wouldn't be empty compliments Fulfilled up conversations That get engraved in the brain He don't even know their name But they thought they hadn't figured out When they heard the songs that he made To an extent that might be true Cause it really only plays through When somebody truly listens But they don't do they know He's really on a mission To make his family different That's really his ambition Yeah, that's really his ambition Since the last time that y'all spoke A lot about him has changed Like now he has tattoos And he loves the art on his body And he's in college too He remembers when you doubted Say he wouldn't graduate But the push down only elevated Him to right your wrongs That you met from him So your words don't live on But his due He already sees the fruit He has bars too That could be deep like an anchor Or a shallow wound up to swim through And he didn't even tell you about the show Cause he figured you had work or something But there you go again Making assumptions Man He don't even know their name But they thought they hadn't figured out When they heard the songs that he made To an extent that might be true Cause they really only play through When somebody truly listens But little do they know He's really on a mission To make his family different That's really his ambition Yeah, that's really his ambition Thank you My name's Mandy Landlotta I'm slowly creeping into the corners of my eyes But I can hide them with a filter They'll never know I have tiny crow's feet I've gathered a couple of extra pounds Over the years But I can conceal them with a slight retouch They will never know that another diet fell I have this blemish They crept up last week And it's taking its time to fade But turn a little to the left And the light skips my cheek They'll never know I still break out like an adolescent I'm a smart ass I'm full of turmoil Losing my husband, my home And my mind all simultaneously Status, it reflects security and pride They will never know That my life is a mess On that day at work I come home and I yell at my kids For absolutely no reason It's not their fault But on Mother's Day I get tagged in memes That make me look like I'm the mother of the century They will never, ever know How I struggle to be a decent mom I'm extremely jealous And I can't stand her in her charmed life I can't stand her stupid makeup tips But I like 9 out of 10 of her statuses So it doesn't look like a fake like They will never know how much I really don't like I carry anger in my heart For those that have done me wrong But I post pictures of butterflies And hummingbirds and inspirational quotes They will never know That I'm full of spite Financial issues Like the ones that led to this morning's Hot pink notice on the door Yeah, but I can hashtag This afternoon's gourmet salad They will never know it was a sympathy lunch From a friend I struggle to maintain work-life balance It's a tug-of-war between home, kids, friends, poetry But I have stellar business endorsements Only then they will never know Why I really left my last job I question God About things that have happened to me Those around me But I'm sure to check in the church every Sunday They will never know how much I really doubt God They will never know any of these things about me Because I hide them behind an LED screen All they know of me Is what I want them to know And none of who I really am Which is a real shame Because the real me Is so much cooler than that bitch I'm a 21st century war poet So this poem I'm going to do is called Adrenaline One strike, two strikes The towers fall The world is sad He gets mad We all get mad But it's his shot to call Someone tell me when is the adrenaline Going to wear off One war, two countries We must invade them all To avenge the deaths of how many people The total's always wrong See his excuse Our belief Weapons of mass destruction Someone tell me when is the adrenaline Going to wear off Not one, not two Not even ten years later If you ask him where are we with this stupid ass war He'd hardly simply say Right where we need to be While he's out hunting deer with old dick chain For him it has, for us it has not Someone tell me when is the adrenaline Going to wear off Not one, not two But three deployments later And I can't sleep at night So I killed the sand grains that have grown Through the door Thinking to myself When am I going to go home Is it going to be when the adrenaline Wears off It never wears off She doesn't understand That I have PTSD so she left me Now I, when is the adrenaline I'm here to read the pitchman's Advice on the continuum Pertuity and perpetuity Life goes on and on No stopping No tears dropping Conclusions not foregone Keep moving, keep improving Soon enough You expend effort, no brooding The testing can be resolved What makes things evolve This is the continuum Every action incites reaction There is no time to wonder To slumber is to blunder Every you should confront Let me be blunt Men every now and do not stop Or slow down They don't care if you frown They don't care if you drown This is the continuum Keep going without measure Who says there would be pleasure More money is the goal Don't add up the toll Keep driving, keep striving Soon enough you'll be arriving Don't you want to see your bunny Don't be a chump Push over that hump This is the continuum Here, give me that You had your turn with the back You took your swing but you missed I'm the king and I'm pissed Go sit at the bleachers With the rest of the leakers It's only perfection that stays in this section You may have tried but you're not qualified No second chance This is the continuum Hey, what's that? Are you still holding that back? Hold on a minute Don't such anger exhibit Put that club down I'm a manary now You ought not treat me like this With intentions remiss I don't want all the seats in the whole stadium I get to say you have to leave or stays in Now, you must go This is the continuum What is the purpose of this verse? If life's course I couldn't reverse I'd listen less to experts self-appointed No matter by whom their expertise anointed I'd more often challenge authority I'd strive with my own eyes to see Pay attention with more alacrity To the plain truth of what is here Because you see certainly for me We are the continuum Greetings and salutations ladies and gentlemen Hope you're having a good Saturday afternoon Is anything yet? Yeah So my name is Andrea, I go by vocab on stage This poem is about my best friend It's called Sacred Tongues Not sacred So much so that we have buried them in the dirt Of our forefathers wailing Who am I to speak on her skin? Red and hewn from earth Amber touched by terracotta She has found her worth informing her heritage Around the sun She speaks to me in a dialect akin to My own but our worlds Are as similarly vast as the waters That separate our ancestors She, like me, has birthed no ravens From her womb but her hair Is as dark as onyx excavated at midnight The corners of her eyes are tight And her lids are wrapped in coal she Stole ancient history from the scrolls of her upbringing And sang me a song of destiny forgotten With lips as soft as cotton She speaks the language Reminds me that I am so far removed From my motherland that the sands of my skin can't Recognize trade winds blown from the Ivory Coast And what I yearn for the most Is the connection to the roots Dimming upward from my family tree I yearn for her to see a little bit of herself When she looks at me I wish I was not raised in ambiguity Welting in uncertainty Peeking through plantation quarters shrouded in mystery Stroking indistinguishable traits handed to me through Jeans and homogeneous origins that I cannot see I am only knowledgeable of five generations That came before me But the palm of my outstretched hand cannot summon Or command a grasp to comprehend who I really am Never will I know or understand the continent That continually circulates in my veins won't Recognize the correlation of tribal dance rhythms Colliding in a pulsing strain of my heart's terrain I cannot audibly claim alliance to any country Within the continent from whence I know my people came My words seem almost profane in my exchange with this woman Who has spoken in the sea that gave birth to her speech I do not envy her, but I admire her As I ask her to teach me the same words so sacred That I cannot pronounce Syllables so unfamiliar to my tongue and ear The clarity of what I hear cannot translate to my lips So I sip enlightenment from her As she curbs her mouth in a dispensation of grace That evaporates the silence and paints this moment Between us in purity I sit and I sip until I want to dig in the ground And reach for a sound that becomes so holy That it sounds sacred to me And I speak sacredly Nyaan-xutebama'i Subhsaarimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimimi Give me one second please let me in eev Have a story but also Often I feel the pressure of hollow potential Crushing this caucus my spirit is cramped And I to see couples retreating into each other's mouths How do secrets in each other's eyes Is that ding dong bitch that I can't stand The burning sensation of hot water over-frozen hands, miracle lava, I rather not bother with the bullshit that comes along with it. I'm not scorned, I've just learned my lesson. How thieves make profession of abducting puppets and making them promises they practice in the mirror. Painting pretty pictures, impressive mixed views, slightly clear-eyed, studied deception in school. Beautiful propaganda, aesthetically pleasing, but treason nonetheless. The art of losing isn't hard to master. My sleeves waving on walk poles, burning like my hands I've held. Too much snow in my day, played too comfortably in the cold. Love is like a poet who freezes on stage and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten how to pray I've been on my feet for so long. I'll fall too long, but it's not your father's mind. For not trusting the way you lie, I don't write love poems often. They say you lose them how you get them and I got her, I thought Spada had some poetry spot. I thought I had to get her. Admittedly, I assume we have shit in common. It makes sense to approach it as typically the story goes. I adored her and she ignored me until she heard how beautifully I fashioned my feelings into rhyming sentences and since then, I've known the texture of completion. I've grown an appreciative of secrets as we became our set family secrets. I mean, she couldn't keep her secrets and though I've had every opportunity to expose her, my love can only show her the snow. Line for line, my genius etched on ribcage and dedication to my gullibility. Where am I so? Moss and butterflies feel the same. Moss and butterflies feel the same. I don't write love poems often. It's not that often that they write about me. Give a round of applause for all the performers that have been so far out there. I mean, shout out to Sean. I really got that song to my city song. I'm gonna put that in my phone. This is my song for Monica. All right, if it'd be the battery, I don't know. Uh-oh. So I didn't charge this. There's a poem about a problem I kind of have. Tonight, my phone was hacked by a gremlin named Whiskey. I am so sorry. But the gremlin told me that this is for the best and that you needed to hear this. So like a devout Christian NASCAR driver, I let Jesus take the wheel at top speed. Tonight, I am Devil May Care, spirits in my cup. Tonight, I'm like yoga pants. I don't care how the world sees me. This is me. And at one point, you love. You should see how I write it because I have like a ton of O's. Truly, I wish I could have texted something more clever like Adele lyrics or whatever. But this text is a gravestone of things needing to be off my chest. Are you even awake right now? Don't answer. Keep dreaming. Love, somewhere during us, I realized my purpose. I'm a kamikaze. I crashed into things really well. And you were a smile like gravity I fell into, but sometimes what we fall into, even love can destroy us. Kind of like Willy Wonka when Augustus Gloop fell into the chocolate river and got sucked up into the pipe. See, that was kind of like us. But see, I don't know which one of us was the kid or the river. All I understand is that I am this fallen broken thing who is truly sorry for the length of this text. And I guarantee you misuse punctuation, semicolon. But since us, I promise to pledge allegiance to broken things realizing that the heart wants what the heart wants, even if it wants nothing. And yesterday on a billboard, I saw an ad that says the force awakens. And I took that to mean that we as people can get even the most difficult things sorted. So ex love, now friend, I'm just so elated that we've made it to this point where we can return in a glass bottomed boat and occasionally survey the wreckage that was us and say, damn, we survived that and it still looks beautiful even at the bottom of an ocean. We're coming to the end of our public performance. I want to say thank you to Nowcast as a for coming to the video of this. This will go on to YouTube where you can then share, get the link and things like that. We will have Amanda, the poet, do you know why that? Out, Amanda Floor. Oh, okay. Amanda Floor is closing out the evening. And before we do that, I will try to do an improv poem and anyone who does improv poems know that sometimes they're awesome and sometimes they're, you just walk away. That's just the way it is. And so we'll just do the same kind of gimmick which is three words that I'll take from you and then try to put something together. Marbles. Mute. Exit. Marbles, mute and exit. We didn't find that. Literation. I don't like alliteration. So don't expect that in this poem. I mean, even though my marbles sometimes are my muse and sometimes my muse is mute when I'm trying to find my music. I find that my memory can't seem to mine anything interesting inside of all of those little paper boxes that I left behind. So I don't like alliteration, so I'm not gonna try. There's the exit door and if you ask me for more I'll probably run out of it as fast as I can. It's like minecraft. I'll just like dig my way out. I don't know. I just don't like alliteration. And I don't like to be pushed in ways that make me do things like mimic other poets as they get on the mic and they show their off their beautiful minds. I just, I can't do it. But what I've seen today has brought me to new heights of trying. I'm gonna go ahead and get myself back on the mic and keep on pushing because I love fighting through all of the things that push and pull and take us down. And I want to find my way forward. So maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe in the future I might find some alliterative things to use in the meantime. Let me say thank you to the Muse, to the Mute, to the Lost Marbles, to the Memories, and always to that exit door. Keep that plan in your pocket for when you need it and you can't find any more n-words. And for now I say thank you and may the force be with you. So we welcome our last poet to the mic and that is Amanda Florence. Thank you so much for joining us on this journey. We want to say thank you also to Black Box Music and Arts for having spoken words on this little challenge and we hope to have a lot more events and maybe with like bring your own beverage type of stuff in the future and so stay tuned. So Amanda, welcome to the mic. I would just like to say that there are a few things that I'd like to do. First thing is I don't like to bring my beverage on stage so it's a thing to consider as poets. And secondly, I hate reading off my device. That being said, I'm gonna read off my device because there was a hubbub of clocks this morning and they all blocked the way to my notebook which is where, from where, I would normally read this. Though it should be up here by now. The poem I'm sharing tonight touches on many of the hardships that a poet encounters before the final work hits the stage or page. And though it focuses on writers concretely, I think it illustrates much of the behind scenes action that artists of all disciplines encounter before the final piece emerges. Seemingly seamless or so many go so far as to say absolutely not seamless and very hard. So much so that you're willing to attend workshops. Do you think that we just write a poem? That we just gather our supplies, pen, paper, write, write, and then it's five happy hours and egg a seat, order something cold to think, head home, breathe the oven, set the poem out to thaw. Do you reckon after hearing of the hardships at hand our office supplies are waiting to work miracles while we sleep, like birds and mice who tail our ball gowns through the night, our tape conspires with our paper clips. It's the only way to help us hold it together. The little cobbler elves visit the scratch shop buried in my notebooks and reupholster them by morning. And no, my poem doesn't wake up like this. You said we must have been born with them, these poems. Like it was inside us all along. Like I didn't just find out how many light bulbs it takes to change this poem. Like I didn't take five too many visits to sour past times to conjure up the sentiment in stanza six, shucks. You think I was born with this poem? That it came in tow with these jeans? Well, thank you. But this poem is not my father's nose or my mother's chin. Though this poem may be their English degrees and not from me. This poem's not innate, not a birthmark nor a mole. Think these poems came beneath pillow after the last of my baby poems fell out? That my syntax and diction are a direct result of my being a cavity-free kid? Oh, perhaps. But now my permanent poems are coming in, and is it supposed to hurt this much? Do you think that I just make a poem? That we just bake them up? That I toss on my apron, gather my ingredients, and freshly-cooked a recipe, and follow along with my favorite chef on Food Network. All my notebooks preheat to 451. No one. And truth be bold? And it is. I don't know what size party this can feed. I have no idea how many this poem will serve, but it was truth to keep me from still trying to dish it. Rest of please, I make this poem from whatever I have in my pantry, most of which is expired. 15 life hacks for making poems, not Pinterest-ed. I go on some of this, a pinch of that, and book people, whatever that is. Because that's the closest thing to a recipe grammar ever gave me for making poems. Poem, poem, poem, poem. Perhaps you say I simply called, and there the poem came. The poem required canine, catchy, but according all too tame. Roses will be roses, but this details germane. You cannot call a thing to come that doesn't have a name. But a poet? Well, a poet is a poet by any other blame. We are servants of verse, the ringbearers of rhythm. We're prolific producers of the profound, aka of our lost, pretend till you're profound. We're honest, clever captains of the colloquial, engineers of eloquence. We are straight-up spy-rock historians, y'all. We are composers of the calm life. Not! We are the loud and volume, and sometimes without a sound. We are the jukeboxes of our own destinies, the clowns of intellect, dukes of double-on ponder, commanders of creative cacophony. And I know what you're thinking. How many lyrical licks does it take to make the poetic center of lyrical happens down to pop? And we can tell you, but then we have to build you. We're humanitarians. We are the meticulous tailors of talk. This is the continuum, and there's a reason you cannot find the mute button. Thank you, Frank. In the future, thank you again to all of our poets. Thank you, Erica Arland. Thank you, Miguel AGM Alcorn. Thank you, Andrea Vokab Sanderson. Thank you, Christopher Rooster Martinez. Thank you, Amanda Flores. Thank you. And I am joining Menace, and we look forward to doing this again, again in the future. Have a great day.