Monday, January 25, 2016

I did something brave tonight.

I performed this poem that I wrote today in front about 70 to 80 people at the Muse in Provincetown during Open Mic.

The Muse serves a lot of dead tortured animals and many of the people in the audience were dining on them.

I explained that this is a new poem from my new body of work called: Poetry for the Gutt

Here goes:

'The floors of the slaughterhouse are covered in blood.

But it's not the blood that makes it so bad.

The terror in their eyes and the nausea in their stomachs.

No, even that isn't what makes it so bad, now, is it?

The screaming. Have you heard a pig, screaming?

They sound just like humans.

Have you seen a pig thrown into boiling water alive?

That's common practice in the meat industry.

But, maybe, that's just not bad enough for you, is it?

How about a pig hanging from his feet, being skinned alive.

Can you hear the screaming now?

I am going to try to help you here, because something is clearly not coming through.

I am going to bring the factory so called 'farms' to you.

Pigs, Are. Confined. They cannot move. They lose their minds. They bang their heads against the walls. They bite obsessively into iron bars.

Cold. Iron.

Is that what your heart is made off?

Trapped. Chained. Forsaken. Abused. tortured.

Oh, and one more thing, baby pigs have their testicles ripped out of them. Beaten. Broken.

Violence. Greed.

And you, you call this an apatite?

You call this dinner? lunch? breakfast?

The next time you eat the flesh of a tortured animal I hope that a piece of you dies.

I hope that compassion grows into that dead piece of you.

I hope that it grows fast because their screams are killing me."

                                                                      -Atara Schimmel

I though that I might be booed of the stage but I wasn't. Few people clapped but the silence felt more appropriate anyway.

I dared myself to do it. It was easy. I want to speak my truth wherever I am regardless of how others will respond to it. That is their choice. My choice is to be brave and to honor every aspect of who I am and what I know to be true.

Congratulations Atara. I really am so proud of you. I love you to the moon and back and into the factory 'farms' and around the world and anywhere and everywhere that your beautiful light-footed feet may travel.

You are everything that I wish to be. You lived up to yourself big time tonight.

What a beautiful day!

What an absolutely beautiful beautiful beautiful day. The sunset was light blues and light pinks and I danced in the cold, to keep warm, to stay with the sunset and the seagulls and to feel the beauty fill my Spirit.




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