How to Write Slam Poetry

1.      Use numbered lists.

2.      Metaphors are the warm luminous sunlight of literature; allow your audience to become the red-speckled lizard on the pavement.

3.      Add really long pauses where they don’t belong…

4.      Take-out-pauses-where-they-do-

5.      Every girl I’ve ever loved has left me

6.      I wish I weren’t born female, but I feel like myself as one, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.

7.      When things start getting too edgy, take it back a notch. Cut to something else.

8.      When I was young, I would go to the back corner of my yard and walk through the branches of our weeping willow.

9.       I first cut my hair in elementary school, and my mom got mad at me. She made me promise I would never do it again.

10.     My dad cut down the weeping willow because the roots were messing up our fence.

11.     Add a laugh here and there so that the edgy parts are even edgier by comparison

12.     Some days in middle school I would spend hours on my floor crying because I was certain no one would ever love me since I have a flat chest

13.     I’m not a great comedian.

14.    My dog, Shadow, might be the goddamn light of my life.

15.    Once, when I was really depressed, my dad told me that his hands used to shake badly when he was younger.

16.    The greatest stress in a relationship with a dog is stepping on its paw.

17.     I continued cutting my hair. I cut my mom’s hair when I was about 12 (at her request), and I’ve cut about seven people’s hair at this point. I even got paid for it once.

18.    Shadow is always sweet to me, and I don’t expect any ulterior motives.

19.    I can’t expect any ulterior motives—if I could, I probably would.

20.    Make some unexpected connection back to something you said earlier.

21.    Jared Leto with long hair and a shaved face might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen

22.    When I’m really depressed, I make lists of things that I like and don’t like; this is oftentimes at least twice as challenging as my academic assignments.

23.     My dad told me, “I thought my life would be perfect if my hands would stop shaking and…”

24.    And now his hands don’t shake.