"Ya Know My Sti"

Immersed in a plethora of monotonous yet sometimes quirky, white male 40 something-ish authors, reading their highly introspective, yet un-relatable words and thoughts (to me and a couple of friends) is a small special spark of luminescence.  Her name is Lorna Dee Cervantes ( If your Cuban like my step dad its just CervanTE) and she becomes the effulgence that this dark, dank, overly crowded bar needs.  Mind you I have no problem with small confining spaces, especially if I'm about to indulge in some earth shattering words that will transcend my spirit to the highest heights of the contemplative cosmos. However the three prior author/poets who had gone before Cervantes, had not provided the "lift off" I needed to spark my interest, as well as they had left little to desire in hearing "the spoken word" outside of my own particular genres of poetic enjoyment and possibly comfort.  As I wrestled with two drunken males for space enough to extend my big toe, and not be the center of their reverse Oreo, I heard a deep penetrating voice with a heavy sultriness that clung to the innards of my ear.  I knew it was Cervantes.  Her delivery of intonations and inflections of vowels, syllables, and words brought me out of my coma induced by the several preceding authors, who were very proficient in their craft ( or the arrangement of their diction, syntax, and ever so often the correctly placed urban contemporary idiom).  But what is spoken word with out rhythm, melody, cadence, and nuance, I ask you?  Well Senora Cervantes, ella traerlo!!  The voice was rich like a sweet sweetness found in the most decadent of desserts, however, it was light enough to be playful when emphasizing pleasantries in such phrases "her lOVee"( upward intonation on the O and V of love).  The rhythm she produced with her voice and the stretching and conflating of her vowels and constants was like an obtrusive melody forced to "be reckoned with".  I was lulling off into a pensive state of tranquility, even if amidst Cervantes' poetic expressions, a drunk guy at the bar kept yelling, "Oohh, You Go Girl!" She had me, and I'm pretty sure, most of the crowd, except the drunk guy at the bar, hanging not onto her every word, but her every articulation of not only phrases, sometimes it was just one syllable and sometimes just a letter. After Cervantes read her, Love Poem for Hannah, I was truly invested in the sounds coming out of her mouth.  I felt as though she were the vortex of a poetic intersection of "beatnik", "hippie", and "down ass sista" by the time she finished her read.   Cervantes' read not only satiated my appetite for an engaging read but the sweet rhythm of her delivery invoked something fiercely admirational about a "voice of the people" being so beautiful, yet so strong and unconforming.  And when I say people I mean, "My Peeps", "La Gente", "La Raza", "Uhuru" and all the communities marginalized by the same subjugation that Imperalist colonization has imposed upon us.  In conclusion, even though I was forced to endure an hour and a half of white male drunkenness, bravado, and loquaciousness, the impact that Lorna Dee Cervantes left on me (kinda) balanced it out.  It is nice to be able to appreciate the words coming out of one's mouth, but also the wordplay that they may invoke with delivery of denotation.