I wrote this one for the edge service on lust this past Sunday. It was an incredible service, and I was surrounded by a lot of good friends. Props to Jarrell, Suzukibuki, Christina, and Jafar for all their writing support. It’s been a blast working with you guys. I love it.

Thanks to Jordin, Steve, Ndumi, and everyone on the arts team that made me feel so welcome in performing.

And one more thanks to everyone who has encouraged me on my journey in life. I hope this poem encourages you on yours too.

–

REPLACEMENT

I am nothing
But me, even though
I wish I was something
To be proud of, something to be learned from
Some THING sent from above
To tell you all the things you love
And want to hear.

That’s what I have thought about myself, and
That, that is where this whole thing started,
When I left where I came from
and departed on a journey
that took me away from me,
from my family,
from who God created me,
that took me toward the Lord
of irresponsibility, promiscuity, the Temple of All-About-Me-Me-Me-Me
Where I sold myself daily
burned incense for acceptance
Hoping that someone would mistake me
For somebody much greater and important
Than a high school sophomore
Who slept with his baby blanket
Who got good grades
Who wore a bad haircut
Who wanted a six-pack of abs
And someone to notice
That I was feeling bad.

No, this was combat.
I wanted to leave
The dim room I had grown up in;
I wanted to burn brighter than I ever had before,

I wanted to replace my essence with
A 15-watt fluorescence.

I wanted to burn
bright, bright white
One of those coiled up, self-ballasted bulbs beautifully spilling
Over living rooms from magazines,
Over super-affluent families
Running eco-friendly-and-efficient
Without the need for someone to change me
for at least two years.

I could be new, the latest techonology
Someone could patent  and make millions
Over my 10,000 hour life
I could save someone 450 kilowatt hours and $225.00 dollars in one year
By running all the time, being completely self-sufficient.
Omnipresent and omniscient in my fixture.

Now, just check the headlines
Of the daily papers two years later
These bulbs contain a very small amount of liquid mercury
To increase their efficiency,
A substance that, when handled, can cause neurological damage,
A poison whose symptoms typically include sensory impairment
(vision, hearing, speech),
disturbed sensation and a lack of coordination.
The type and degree of symptoms exhibited
depend upon the individual toxin, the dose,
and the method and duration of exposure.

Now, it’s not as bad as it sounds:
the only way to come in contact with the poison
Is to break the bulb, or handle it roughly
So that it’s casing breaks;
The only way to come into contact with the poison
Is to touch the bulb
And try to change it,
To try and replace it.

That’s when the poison can get in your home.
And ruin everything you’ve spent your life building.
That’s when the poison can find your children.
Break the bulb, kill the baby,
(Maybe.)

And so in looking for fluorescence
I changed out my essence,
My incandescence, the light bulb
As it was originally created.
Because here is what incandescence actually means
At least according to the dictionary:
glowing or white with heat
intensely bright; brilliant.
masterly; extraordinarily lucid
like a masterpiece
or glowing with the purpose
and vitality of youth.

I didn’t know what I was replacing
When I changed myself,

The way I look at it now,
I escaped death, burned out
Before I broke and needed
Masked people to clean me up and dispose of the shards of my body.
The way I look at myself now,
I get to bear the image of how I was created,
Look like Edison’s original inspiration.
Way I look at myself now,
I feel more like the fixture
That holds the light, the fixture
That never changes,
The fixture plugged into the power source,

The fixture that unites God to the light.

I get to be twisted, a conductor of electricity;
I get to be God in the flesh.
I don’t care about the theology and the theory,
I get to be the intermediary
A light that has been replaced by Christ
Over and over and over again when I have burned out,
A light that gets to smile, and laugh, and dance,
And cry, giving light to other burned out bulbs
Or ones that have not been used yet,
Giving hope that they will one day be twisted,
Holding tight while free suspended from a ceiling,
Giving light to everything they see, know, and believe,
Holding tight to something greater
Than the hope of saving time and money
Than the hope of living forever

Understanding what it is to savor the feeling
that comes from doing someone else a favor
and letting  myself be replaced
with something greater:

being used the way I was made,
for the exact purpose
for the incandescence
designed by the creator.

END

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Open mic 03.04.009. A couple of buddies and myself have been throwing a weekly open mic on OU’s campus that has blown up a little bit, strictly by word of mouth. I thought I’d share my latest piece here though, and add some new stuff since I haven’t written in so long. Hope you enjoy. The open mic is in the Vandenberg lounge on Wednesday nights at 9:30 pm if you wanna come. Peace and more stories soon.

–

There were some words my brother said

That almost drove me off the edge.

“When is Cam going to let his childhood go?” he said.

I overheard them being spoken to my mom at a wedding,

And ever since, I have overhead them in my head,

My mind whispering a truth about me I didn’t know

And I never thought about.

And now, my mind is gossiping against me,

Sounding like my mom and my brother;

My mind, sounding like the voices of those who love me

But apparently, think I’m dead already.

So I wonder aloud, to no one listening,

Has my life really become a story?

A permanent past that I cannot escape from

Except by damnation and subsequent banishment,

Or an act of God,

Or lighting myself on fire.

With all this past hanging around my emotional attic,

I’m merely a walking insurance claim

That my family is waiting to put out to pasture

On the State Farm

In return for a small sum of cash for “damages.”

It’s true, my life is built not for a lifetime of happiness

But more for Lifetime, for happiness of others

Watching me, gasping in delight at the drama-rama,

The daytime soap opera I’m singing from stages

Make-believing I’m living in cages

That prohibit me from being what I am capable of,

The circumstances that confine me to who I am

And who I could be.

The whole first season is on DVD

And the rest is coming out soon.

There are episodes with titles like:

Divorced childhood: The tales of the Terrible Tuesdays and Thursdays with my Dad, with bonus features about saving my little brother’s life from stale pop-tarts and peanut butter,

Or Friendsless, the series about apparently having no friends during high school,

Or XXX-Girlfriend, The stories of bad relationships and the devastating effect of sex on my psyche and ability to be good to the women that I care about today,

Shall I go on?

How about one more, a real crowd pleaser?

No? Well, here’s at least a teaser:

It’s about a boy who threw away his education to come to a commuter school in the dying Michigan economy because he was in loooooove…

Now that is a story to be told,

That is a story to enrapture,

A story to unfold like socks in your parent’s underwear drawer when they’re not home

and you know there is something juicy in there, something better

Than being home alone,

Something to capture

the imagination.

Problem is, my past has captured my imagination too.

My past has captured my own mind, and it won’t let me

Live here in the present;

It’s like I’m paying rent—-

To my Memory,

The smoker-cough landlord of the muses

That guide all my poetry,

The one siren I can hear blaring over all the music, story, happiness, contentment

I find in the present—

He’s the one who sings the songs of resentment.

He’s the one who controls all the sentiment.

He’s the one who picks all the theme music.

He’s the producer of the box set of my life,

The owner of the track

That I am forced to re-run-re-run-re-run-re-run and

PAUSE.

Let me just sit here for a second.

Let me just stare at a non-moving screen,

And try and recognize the actor playing this scene.

He’s hard to make out with my eyesight

But when I turn around I can see him in hindsight

Perfect 20/20.

Perfect.

Perfectly imperfect.

Perfect because the stories are already written.

They don’t have to be rewritten.

Why write new stories when

You have the classics.

They are ones I love to watch and critique,

Search for new things and old things

And remember the way things were,

How they used to be

Back when I was happy,

The days when the laugh track never stopped laughing,

The days when it was almost real,

The days when I could almost feel

My way through the dark dark moment

I was in.

There were some days I wasn’t on the TV set

Waiting for sound check or scene test,

There were some days I performed with no cameras

Instead reciting my lines in front of a dark set

Of chairs and cameras.

All the eyes were sleeping on those days,

And I could pretend that I was in a beautiful old theater,

Imitating the people I would love to be

Without worrying about who I was,

Or what my family would think of me.

When you are a character, your own past doesn’t exist,

And you are free to be who you want,

Because the theater goers,

They understand it’s a performance,

That all your actions deserve forgiveness.

It’s different when you’re on TV,

Waking up in people’s homes, eating with them,

When their hopes rise and fall on what you do,

Not on how you perform.

It’s scary

Becoming a part of a family.

And it’s even scarier

When you’re family doesn’t want to watch you anymore,

When they wonder when you’re going to let your childhood go.

It’s like they don’t like seasons 11-17,

But you just keep on making episodes,

Psychotically,

Neurotically,

Ironically

Making episodes.

I’ll let my childhood go. I’ll let my past go.

I’ll release the drama-rama soap opera

And let you watch what you want to:

The good times, the stories where there wasn’t turmoil,

The stories from when I was still young

And they all still loved me

Because I was easy.

I understand now

That it’s hard being a child star

Who can’t let their childhood go

A person who can’t come to know

What they were created for.

And so, as I continue to record

I thank God that He alone is still watching

Helping me to form

A show that started the minute

I was born;

But thankfully will not end the minute I die,

Instead, one that will continue to roll

Throughout the entire life of my soul,

Scene to scene, take to take,

Season to season,

With a reason to believe

That there is something more to all of this,

That my childhood is more than just a myth

Meant for the fire.

So yeah, I’ll let my childhood go,

When TV Land gives up the Jeffersons,

And VH1 gives up bad dating shows,

And I stop loving the Fresh Prince.

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Ok, this is a short story. It won’t take you very long to read. It’s not even that spectacular of a story. Simple brotherhood rarely makes the headlines. More often than not, it’s a lack of brotherhood that hooks us: violence, lack of forgiveness, unrest, war, etc. But I ask you to read it. Please. read more…

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There is more to tell, absolutely, like falling off the bunk bed when I tried to scramble up it in the dark, or the service at Peacemakers the next morning which featured an elderly man shadowboxing during the preacher’s sermon (which consisted almost exclusively of the words “Keep swingin’!”). There was seeing Brother Al’s factory for the first time, riding to it and an incredible soup kitchen in his mustard yellow Mercedes that felt like it was going to fall apart at any second. read more…

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When we went down the street a couple blocks, we were met with a sight none of us expected except for DT: about seventy white people, read more…

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I know I’ve been jumping around all over the place, so I’m going to get back on the chronology here: we walked into the mission Friday night with our backpack and bag of fruit. That night, we talked to at least a dozen people, meeting them, hearing their stories, asking how they were doing and where they were going to be that weekend. That was the same night we met DT, and we fell asleep in a half circle of four chairs, with him at one end and me at the other. We were awakened at 5 am the next morning, made to stand against the wall while the floors were washed and things cleaned up for about an hour, then made to sit and wait at the tables for another hour until 7 am when breakfast was served. read more…

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Have you ever watched a Discovery Channel special about the ocean and how those coral reefs are always “teeming with life?” I always find it really interesting watching the divers around the reef, going into it. They always look monumentally out of place, like they are some invader from a different planet.

My favorite reaction is that of the fish. read more…

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The barbecues held by Mike are always at this little park at the corner of Second St and Selden, which comes off of Woodward right near Union Street restaurant and the Magic Stick/Majestic/Garden Bowl complex. It felt fitting to be walking down the sister section of Selden on our way to cross the Lodge and enter an entirely new way of life.

Before we get into the shelter, though, there are three small stories too good to not mention. read more…

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We had agreed to meet at 5 pm Friday to head down to Detroit. Our exceptional group punctuality and the desire for one last cafeteria dinner with our friends put us on the road at 8 pm, with a stop at my mom’s house still due. At least we were each dressed for the part; I had five shirts on, two pairs of pants, and two pairs of socks to take me the next 48 hours, and Rob and Kevin each had something comparable. We had no wallets and one cell phone with whatever battery life it could get if we absolutely needed it. The only thing we decided to carry read more…

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Over the course of the two weeks prior, Rob, Kevin, and I prayed, wrote, and got together twice. We told a select few people and asked their opinion. The most popular question was by far, “Why?” Every time I heard it, I wanted to fire back “Why not?” but we supposed we did need a pretty good explanation. read more…

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