The Annual Poetry Award for the Token Poverty Class Poet

I do not care for your quotidian sesquipedalian poetry or prose.

Periphrastic pensive gazing from your opulent safety glass windows incites me to vomit my plastic pellet fish and glyphosate potato dish over it. You obfuscate words to sunder your world from mine, erecting the heart’s frozen vault, creating the ironic foundation of your whining melancholy.

Such perspicacious people surely ought to be living in joy. Yet here you sit. Imprisoned in ignorance, in selfishness over service.

It doesn’t take grandiloquence or prolix to craft pulchritudinous verses and inspire connection to love. But you skim my facile words with parsimonious hearts convinced there is nothing to be learned from my floccinaucinihilipilification class.

You exist in equal nescience of your powerful, pernicious effect on our shared reality. Yet I must pass through your hoops of pedantic semantics to even address your aristocracy.

A place where I can never be accepted.

At best I become a novelty. A bauble decorating the tree of your award ceremony. Filling the quota of special invitations reserved for the underprivileged few. Us working class who fought our way to an educated view.

Gasping. Grasping by bloodied fingertips and bowed on scraped knees. All to be here in presence of your quips about a life you couldn’t have survived, let alone thrived after escaping.

All for the prize to become a mocking bird of your world and mine.
 All for an elaborate game in which each side denies their shame, hiding how they are in fact, the very same.

Each refusing to look inside, the partially polished mirror that is me. Shunning the glorious manifestation of your deeply repressed ignorance. On proud display for you not to see.

Do you now offer platitudes with alms, or plaudits with palms? Will any of you stand? For the little girl inside of me, who journeyed through hell, to make it to thee?

Of course you will.

This entire charade predicts, inevitable claps from your cliques. Applauses for this poetry monkey, the working class novelty packaged in second hand clothes and aged skin. You bait your breath as my speech begins.

You listen with intent stares, masking anxiety with feigned airs, perfected over many years. Scared of what truths I may speak, for we both know which of us is truly weak.

The guilt of your privilege washes you in shame as you recall the montage of inaction on your side of the game.

Decades of indulgence and ease hides beneath your averting eyes, silently begging at me please.

You sit as a manicured flock on the cliff edge of pleasantry. Your feathery silence hovers on the ledge as I fire these verbal bullets so deliberately.

No one dares to speak aloud your shared elite fear. All feeling at risk when the token poor gives this speech each year. You want to hear thank you’s that are fully undeserved, praying to go home with your egos preserved.

What will she say?

She.

Me.

The peasant with the poetry.

A mind good enough to score this invite but with clear questionable breeding.

Don’t the poor all harbour resentments towards us from their lifetime of needing?

As I draw to the end of what I came here to say, closing this speech with the gratitude for which you prayed. Your thundering applause of relief resounds as you all stand to commend my talented crown.

For today we maintain an unspoken truce, to hide from view any form of truth. We each pretend this poem was just for fun, neither acknowledging the smoking gun.

Smiles.

Handshakes.

Is any of it true?

Neither side admitting that this entire speech was made directly, and correctly to you.