It’s Poetry Friday! And I’m trying to jump back on (and stay on) the Poetry bandwagon. I don’t know why it’s so tough for me except that I am in short supply of confidence in the poetry department so it always makes me hesitate and then, usually, the time has passed.

Tonight I realized I’d never posted more poems from my incarcerated teen poetry project. The past month their work has been on display at the deSaisset museum at Santa Clara university as part of the ArtsConnect program sponsored by Arts Council Silicon Valley. Below are the displays they made with their poems (kind of a 3D effect). The backgrounds are a combination of paint and collage. You can click on each photo (they are all different) to see the larger version which makes the rest of the poems legible but I’ve put a few here in the post as well.

It’s so very hard to get teenage boys to dig deep about the emotional stuff in their lives. Compound that by trying to get boys who are locked up, away from their family, their girlfriends, and in some cases, their children, and asking them to write about their feelings is rarely embraced. And yet that’s just what these boys did. Session after session they wrote their hearts out for me.

For those of you who don’t know about the project, there is a list of links at the bottom of the post to tell you a bit more.

Now, the student work.

From Arts Connect 2010

I’m the aspirin always getting taken from the medicine box
Trying to fix for a minute but it never lasts too long
I wanna be like a giraffe with my head about it all
I’m at the top of the ladder where I can never fall
I’m an eagle, a leader, I soar through the sky
I don’t play with the pigeons because their mind is not right
I’m caged like an animal but want to be set free
I’m a lion in the jungle I run my domain
Reality hits
I’m Daniel
an 18 year old looking forward to tomorrow

~~~ Daniel

From Arts Connect 2010

 

 


THE POWER OF

I’m a strong individual
Power so strong, the guy who couldn’t get visible
People get a visual
See, but they don’t,cause my life is invisible
Do what I want and times can get critical
Powers so strong, it feels like life is a miracle
but still
I’m invisible

~~~ Rudy

From Arts Connect 2010

I feel motivated to strive
And eat cuz I’m hungry,
I feel like a dodgeball
Being thrown around
I’m feeling sleepy
And language can’t explain
The unhappy thoughts in my  mind
I want forgiveness
And to wake up to a better day

~~~Sergio

From Arts Connect 2010

 


I’m like the devil in disguise
I sound like bombs going off in a city, like death to a man
I look nice but inside I’m crazy in the mind
I smell like gun powder, evil in its darkest form
I taste bitter and sour, like snakes venom and nothing more.
I’m nothing nice

~~~ Sergio

Kelly Polark has the Poetry Friday round-up today. Check out some of the other great posts.

*** For those of you who missed the series of posts about my 10 sessions teaching poetry to incarcerated young men, you can read them all here, in order: