I Will Speak Genius to Myself

I Will Speak Genius to Myself
Ruth Forman

So tired of trying to prove myself
analyticalphilosophicalintellectually
know what I mean?
Those epistemologicalterminal terms dammit
clutter my mind.  Styrofoam words.

What happened to
using your own words
as long as you made yourself understood?
Now
I must recite flawlessly
another's vocabulary
before I can make sense in my own.
When I was a child
people understood me by watching my bright eyes
and butterfly hands.
In the academy I suppose
some white man taught everyone
to go blind-
to memorize terminology
to clap for words
seen as academic
to refuse on whose words are not.

And they learned their lesson well
for the audition is over
and there remains a brown girl
in the middle of a polished wooden floor.

And so here I am
lighting a disappointed cigarette
in the middle of the stage
the wooden stage
polishedreallyshiny
really fucking shiny
with absolutely no scratches on it.

I can see my brown face in the reflection
but no one else is here so no one else can see it
Doesn't matter anyway
I'm sure someone would say
that it is not an authentic face
because it's defined in a brown polished floor context
which is of course
outside of a grey rough concrete context
which is of course
really the only context for a face like mine

But I know that my face is authentic
my mind is authentic
my words are authentic
so I will speak genius to myself

Satisfied I snub my cigarette in the waxy finish
and stroll off the empty stage
to my concrete context

It's too bad that no one will ever know
what was in the brown image; after I'm gone
all they will see
is that old cigarette burn in the middle of their
very very shiny wood floor.