Improv 2, Week 4

The second improv is a riff of Adrian Matejka's, "This Be The Verse," which in turn riffed Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse."

This is the skin they put me in,
my mum and dad. Remied melanin,

olio for the asthmatic and color blind.
See how it bronzes on command.

So how my hyrbrided daughter looks
darker while on the beach with me.

If my skin was a chicken wing,
I'd lick my eyebrows before

code switching inflections.
If my skin were a woman, I'd check

my leopard print steering wheel
at the door. I'd transform my crust

of rust and sea salt into something
more 21st Century. Borges said,

Things belong to the past quite quickly,
so I'd throw some butane on my funk

transistors. Face paint my brown
band aid convocation. Toss my sweaty

"Free South Africa" muscle shirt
to the crowd at the recycling bing.

I'd leave it to the ghetoo fabulous
to ID the magical backspin of skin.


Larkin's 1989 poem 'This Be The Verse' begins with the line, "They fuck you up, your mom and dad." Matejka's version begins, "This is the skin they put me in, my mum and dad." Though both poems have a similar beginning, they branch off into two completely different topics. Larkin speaks of how parents corrupt you and Matejka speaks of how his parents created his skin color (and the after affects of their actions). For my piece, I decided to use the "mother and father" line as a spring board and then let my mind run to see where I ended up. I began thinking of how parents discipline their children and received a lot of imagery from this that I decided to use for the construction of my piece. The work below was the end result:

They whipped me in and out,
mother and father, the immutable

pharohs of my youth. The
leash crackled and my

skin bled into my brain
marring what was once my

innocence. If my tongue were
a brick, it'd grate the concrete

with syllables of sharply
pointed cryptographs. If I

were rain, I'd pelt and stain the
inflections of skin-on-skin

rug burns. The metallic
whelps are dunes on my thighs,

mountains of things meant to be learned
only leading to a starved plague.

Adam and Eve envy my agony-
pleasanted only by the fact

that each strike feeds
a hungry child in Africa.

How many cents a day are
wasted on the cleansed and cleaned?