Poetry Response : Bloodletting by Saul Williams

This poem struck a tender cord with me.  I'd never heard the poetry of Saul Williams before, but it seemed that everything he said in this poem was something I had been trying to articulate myself but had never succeeded.  The intensity, the anger presented in it I feel I've always been afraid of expressing because of the backlash I've always received by offending people.  It's so evocative and authoritative like a call to arms or a manifesto of those scorned by the cancerous nature of the modern world who realize that as long as people conservatively and fearfully cling to the failed and barbaric ways of the past the future will be no less grim, but that also realize that nothing can be done within moral reason to change the minds of those who cling to these ways.  The one line "wisdom no longer comes with age" speaks so loudly to this point that it gave me goosebumps when I first heard it.  The music laid over the poem is hard to ignore in describing the tone of the message.  Very reminiscent of Rage Against the Magine, it is dark and angry without being really sinister.  The imagery and the phrasing as the poem progresses grows more and more violent and intense, as does the reading, to the point that I am caught up in the tone and feel I can hardly take in the message as quickly as it is being read.  I listened to the poem dozens of time and every time I feel I pull something else from the complicated storm of powerful phrases.  By the end it's hard for me to pick out precisely what Saul is advocating, weather it be spirituality or the abandonment thereof.  The words are general enough to be universally applicable, but his personal meaning is something I'm really interested in.