Ziggle Zaggle

From 1995 to 2006, I wrote a lot of verse and committed much of it to memory. We started having poetry slams and readings at The Empty Glass in Charleston in November of 1999, and I would go on to read and recite poetry and other writings at the Glass and around the Charleston area dozens of times before I left the city seven years later.

I would also go on to release a spoken word CD, Words Strung Together, in 2007.

All of that began with this piece here; it was the first great victory of my serious writing life, and it was the first poem, of anyone’s, that I learned to recite by heart.

I’d read Kerouac, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to change the world. Who knows, I may have. I certainly changed mine.

Ziggle Zaggle

Pride going not beyond the bounds of the jester’s,

being the inner child.

Days allowing not that the soul should

fester

between the righteous and the wild.

Feet do step, vibe does dance,

and booty sho’ do waggle.

Rage and bounce, project and pronounce.

Waggle, wiggle, ziggle, zaggle.

Ziggle, zaggle, waggle, wiggle,

and all that lies between.

Celebrate life in your soul, my friend,

that’s how it was meant to be.

Celebrate love, and celebrate us,

your passions, and their harmony

and ziggle and waggle and wiggle and

zaggle,

and the very you, you’d be.