“let’s escape,
let’s jump over the rail without looking for water,
or waste time on the debate,
the choice.
let’s explore and forget our names
and find our voice under rocks that look like faces,
through the woods
leading to a farm
where simple and breathing are the same.”
– “esc” from “Words In Grey” by Genesis the Greykid
I wrote this poem on a train while searching the deepest parts of my heart. Sometimes it feels like you have to unlearn a lot before you can really start learning anything.
I remember leaving New York, headed back down to Chattanooga, when a conversation ignited between an older woman with a beautiful walking stick and myself.
We spoke about life, death, then she left me with an interesting thought: “Genesis, don’t ever stop exploring. You got a lot of depth upstairs. We live in an era right now where people have a lot of stuff in the windows, but nothing in the room.”
After I jumped on the train and she disappeared in an ocean of people, I couldn’t help but break down what she left me with before writing the poem.
“Don’t ever stop exploring.”
This does not refer to exploring a physical place. No, this exploration is about delving into something within, looking under the rocks inside your soul, finding the hidden places of the heart, and mind.
“Depth upstairs.”
Think of this as the heavy matter that rests deep inside your bones. We all have a key to this “upstairs” or “balcony” where we can see the world outside ourselves. Once we can unlearn enough, step outside of our bias, unlearn the responses we develop way before understanding what the other is trying to say, once we can shed all of that is when we’re truly able to dig deep.
The problem is never someone being smarter than the other – in my humble opinion – but simply remembering and reminding yourself that you’ve got a key in your pocket. We don’t have to abandon our crazy “truths” or wacky opinions – and trust me, I have some wild ones – but remember we can place those outside the door, reach into our pockets and access a key that takes us deep within the root of any given problem or situation.
“We live in an era right now where people have a lot of stuff in the windows, but nothing in the room.”
I remembered this last part of her statement from another quote. It wasn’t the same statement but embodied a similar observation. It basically alluded to the fact that we live in an era in which people are more concerned with packaging or the look of something than mastering the craft or skill of that “thing.” Social media allows us to inflate these things in such a way we go on living with this “perceived” momentum of life. We look like we’re exploring, but we haven’t set foot into our own landscape within. We have a lot of things on the surface – the window – but nothing deeper in the room.
Here’s the Words In Grey exercise for the month. The exercises are designed to get you exploring, placing yourself in a context you may not often find yourself in then forming some ideas and language around that context through poetry and within a limited amount of time. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a writer or not, it’s more about tapping into that “hidden wholeness”; it’s more about exploring. Through this process, we discover parts of ourselves and ultimately develop an acute awareness of the world around us.
So try this:
If your heart was a nightclub/bar downtown, what kind of music would play in it? Write down three songs that you could hear playing.
Now, write a poem from the perspective of someone that’s never been to this “nightclub/bar,” aka your heart. Walk in, hear the music playing, look at all your heart’s glory and scars and hidden secrets. In this nightclub it’s all out in the open, written on the walls.
By giving your heart human qualities, by choosing to write from a stranger’s perspective, it allows you to gain a truly unique sense of yourself.
Genesis the Greykid is a full-time creative who recently released a book of poetry with creative exercises titled,”Words In Grey.” Contact him at info@WordsinGrey.com.