a spoken word poem

my history books have long since burned the names of the renaissance men behind my eyelids.

i think if I really tried i could weave their names into this poem like thread tied up in sheet music make this poem about them, those men who crowned italy with the golden age and wrought gems from the juggling warrior lands.

and i could make it beautiful.

baldassare castiglione would be proud of me, i think. the courtier would shower its praises on my head like the laurel wreaths it stole from daphne’s body and the humanist in him would

cry for the heavens claim its frame of enlightened curriculum around my words and dash my name in european history alongside the titles of the masters and the monsters.

and he would make it beautiful.

//

but i won’t wait around for footnotes. wait around as i am demoted at the hands of editors and dethroned by the fragile masculinity of future kings and emperors.

no, if i were an artist, i would make this about a renaissance woman. weave her from porcelain and granite china and stone skin and bone she would wear her sorrow like a showcase let her rock-hard heart show through the spidering cracks of fragile insecurities

show the world that a man is not always a masterpiece

and that she could make it beautiful too.

//

if i were a sculptor, i would mold her out of clay like prometheus modeled man

so i could press my palms to hers and bless potential on her breath whisper that men will try to break her to bits but

why sharpen swords when you have a perfectly good shield

why waste warriors when you have a perfectly good wit

i would tell her to don her anger like armor because the gods know she’ll need it when they come to tear her to pieces for refusing to fight like a man for calling it fighting like a woman instead. wield your womanhood like a weapon, i’d say. you have a gaze to glare with, fists to fight with, and you shall conquer the galaxy my dear femininity and all.

//

if i were a scholar, i would reforge the universities from within with her. before the philosophes come to amputate her with their academics, i would help her wring prose from papyrus scrolls and leech the liars with soft lullabies of knowledge. teach her to dig wells of wealth so deep they would make petrarch weep teach her how to soften her sleep with those wakeful and wonderful words.

and remember, i’d tell her, to study your soul well and sign your syllabus with your elixir of tears. and when there is no textbook for your heartbeat, you write your own because no renaissance man will ever know you as well as you know yourself.

//

i lied when i said i wanted to be a writer when i grow up.

because when i build this renaissance woman, i want it to be me.

a girl so bright and blinding she could send the sun spiraling out of space

and force the weakness of men to yield to her.

a girl so light with laughter and language that

latin spilled from her lips and stained her fingertips with folly.

a girl who could find the words to bring the universe to its knees.

but i? i am just a girl with an imperfect mind and an injured tongue playing at being poet. and i do not yet know how to make do with the wickedness of this world, but she?

she would make it beautiful.