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TVBC
SCOTT WOODS founded the music and poetry
performance group The Black Air Poets, who released their first
CD, Touch, in March 2001. He has published articles,
short stories, and other prose work in a variety of
publications, and has written eight volumes of poetry and prose,
including Poetic Predator, Can You Hear Me Now?, Come
& Feel, and Inside. Woods’ work has
been used in creative writing and historical literature classes
at the Ohio State University and numerous high schools. He was
the coach and a member of the Columbus Slam Team that placed
third in the 2000 Rust Belt Regional Poetry Slam (and won it in
2001), and was the coach and a member of Columbus’s first-ever
National Poetry Slam Team that participated in the 2001 National
Poetry Slam in Seattle, Washington. He currently MCs a weekly
open mic series in Columbus, Ohio, when he is not doing shows,
and is the unofficial secretary for the Midwest Poetry Slam
League. Click
Here to order copies of Woods’ works from Poetry Slam
Incorporated. Click
Here to visit his homepage.
Elevator Dreams / Scott
Woods
A project elevator has no loyalties but to gravity.
Sometimes I keep pressing the top floor button on the
elevator
when it works,
hoping that it will break through the shaft,
roof, and sky
hoping that it will land this piss-stained box of audacity
somewhere at least safe.
How ironic to hope that something as unsafe as a project
elevator
might know the way to safety.
How unlike reality and so like a dream.
People think dreams don’t exist here, but they’re wrong.
This place is a graveyard of dreams.
Dreams come here all the time,
pop up in the strangest of places
because they are more malleable here than
anywhere else in the world.
Here, I must dream of grass.
I must fantasize about safety.
It is in the cracks of ordinary horror that dreams are
usually born.
Sometimes I keep pressing the top floor button on the
elevator
when it works,
hoping that it will break through the shaft,
roof, and sky
hoping that it will land this grease-stained box of audacity
somewhere at least fantastic.
I could care less about reality.
“Keeping it real” is a mantra for pretenders.
Reality is a cold, backstabbing set of headlights on a
deer thinking
it’s made the Big Time.
Show me someplace where the police come when you call
and the only unwanted bug in your home is the flu and
let me worship in the Church of Unreality.
Let me swing my smoky canteen of blessings down the
aisle,
leading the choir in a hymn of wishes for love that doesn’t
know
how to make a fist.
Let me baptize myself and swim in the ether of the
whispering lust of broken prostitutes
and
do something unreal in someplace unreal, like
raking leaves in a back yard with grass and
everything.
A project elevator has no loyalties but to gravity,
and no matter how hard I press that top button,
pounding it and pounding it as the box wheezes and
shudders to its
inevitable limit,
no matter how many times I take a butter knife to the
greasy metal of the panel and scratch
the word
“FREEDOM” next to that button
that I know stops at 17
over and over again,
I still think,
one day,
when the elevator bothers to work,
when the ancient chicken smell no longer moors me to
your insipid realities,
that it might keep going
that it might still be possible
to escape.
—TVBR Issue #23: Vol.
IX, No. 1—Taking
Flight
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