Tonight’s Performance: graffiti’d body

My body is a building and in these thirty-six years of living inside it, I have been tagged and broken into. I have had invited guests and uninvited guests. I have even tagged myself.

Bodies are like buildings because they have many stories.

Bodies are like buildings because they have visitors.

Bodies are like visitors because they are hard but also cracked in some parts. They have windows; they see things. They can crumble; they can be built back up.

Tonight, I offer up my body as a building to be tagged. To be written on. To be entered with text or paint or labels or just wandering eyes.

InspiredWordNYC presents LAST FRIDAYZ @ Local Project, an event inspired by the epochal underground spirit of the long-gone Gaslight Café, SAMO, and Folk City.

ALL AGES WELCOME.

Doors open @ 7pm for open mic sign-up, show starts @ 7:30pm and ends at midnight.

12 slot open mic for music, poetry, spoken word, and performance art ONLY – a strict 6-minute time limit for anything spoken, 7 minutes for anything musical (please time your pieces and respect the time constraints). Slots are first come, first served. Overflow will be put on a standby list.

Tickets are available for $8 dollars online or $10 at the door.

$7 Early Bird Specials are available up to a week prior to the date. *Limited Availability*

InspiredWordNYC will donate $2 of every ticket sold to Local Project. There’s also a donation option on this page where you can donate whatever you’d like directly to this wonderful organization.

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Who: Produced by InspiredWordNYC
http://InspiredWordNYC.com

Where: Local Project
http://www.localproject.org/
11-27 44th Road
Long Island City Queens

graffiti’d poetics

We tag buildings with our names or a version of letters which resemble who we are. We boast how fearless we can be by climbing vacant subway trains and reaching questionable heights to hollow out poems onto rooftops and skyscrapers’ windows. We breathe the fumes of aerated paint onto bridges and brick walls. We call this art. Because it is.

When I think about the body, it is hard not to describe it as window’d or broken into. It is difficult not to search for the flaps of skin that may be used like deadbolts to lock out the ones who crawl their way in. Body as a building. Body as a construction site. Carved out poemflesh.

On an evening right before autumn arrived, I removed my clothes. Bound breasts beneath caution tape. Covered bottom half in prophylactics to protect and preserve.  I exited a stage and allowed an audience of others to write on me. Alongside another poet, we read out a collaboration of language, as humans wrote their names on us and messages of love and curiosity. One woman inked her mathematics into my back and I wondered all evening what this combination of numbers unlocked. There was a symbol on my thigh and a sliced poem below my collarbone. An affirmation on my lower back and a list of desires on my forearm.

At the end of this evening, the poet and I were covered. After writing on me, she asked me to write on her.

I wrote:

When poetry dissects, silence is lost.

There are so many ways in which to communicate. Many choose the press of fingers against handheld devices. Others ask for the presence of bones and skin to climb their way into present-tense room. Eye contact is becoming extinct. So, I offer up this body as a gesture of paper to write your poems on. Please use invisible welcome mat and wipe your feet and eyes first. Give the trees a break and remember that this skin can be washed and written on and erased and read. There is so much magnificence in the ability to let go of silence and unravel the body like a scroll.

What would you write on another if given the opportunity?