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Second Poetry Reading
2003-06-04 - 5:06 p.m.


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So last wednsday I went down to the coffee shop for the monthly poetry readings.

I arrived fifteen minutes late, but they weren't even starting yet.  I signed up as the first reader.

Gradually a crowd filed through the open doors, people came in and stayed.  I made eyes at the "matriarch" of the scene.  Behind the counter I met the girl I walked with on the riverwalk a month or two ago.

"You're eyes, something about you,"  I said, "I know you from somewhere."

"I just moved here a few months ago," she said.

I went and got some coffee, decaff from the station of four types of coffee.  The whole thing is still rather mysterious to me.  I'm much more comfortable with drugs and whiskey.

I whipped back around. "I know who you are," -powerful words-"we walked on the riverwalk!"

"Oh yeah..." the dawning light of realization.

"You had blue nailpolish, and was from a small town in wisconsin."

She seemed impressed that I remembered her nailpolish.  Which is cool, because I definitely do not get enough credit ever for noticing the things I do.  Really sometimes I don't mention half or a quarter of what I see, simply because being too attentive can be the kiss of death, when really my ambiguously powered mind is simply taking things in like a big ol' flesh taperecorder, documenting the irrelevant shapes, sounds and other sensations in my life in a festival of the minutae.  Put another way, I can have a conversation with you, a passing thing, and years later after not seeing you recall it in stark clarity.  This tends to freak people out a bit.  The people who have grown up with me are used to it by now.

Hence, the drugs.  For that and many reasons, hence the drugs.  Intoxication, I duly miss thee, but you ended up being such a needy bitch of a mistress.  Succor me not, and I left you.

Anyway.

I sat down to read, sunlight beaming through the clear windows and open doors.  I started with a poem about death, the suicide memorial bench in Keystone, CO I have mentioned many times in my diary.  The pages fell around my chair as I bent to my task. 

I finished and looked up.  Silence.  Crickets and tumbleweeds.  A sea of dumbfounded faces.

However, the few that actually know poetry looked upon me with awe.  Its a good stark peice.

I wrapped up with some bawdy peices and some comedy.  The matriarch laughed.

And when I say matriarch, its only that she's set herself up so in relation to this scene.  She's not old.  There is a smoldering sexiness about her eyes, a darkness that says all my sins are virtues when veiwed by her countenance.  A certain fear and a sense of death, adventure and passion.  Raven tressed and lightly pallored, she's attractive to me.

I ended to applause.  I sat and listened to the others, getting really horny.  There is something to a good read that just makes my cock want to sit up and dance.  And watching girls read, even girls I wouldn't ordinarily think about putting my cock in grow sexier by the moment.  I cannot explain it, and wonder that sometimes my passion will be noticed and manipulated by those around me in a weakened state of resolve.  Either way, it'.ll be fun.

And the scene is accepting and forgiving.  I have a certain sense of swagger, a warrior-poet in a crowd of sensitivity, there is a sense of my presence and involvement.  As ever, also, I draw asses in off the street.

Not enough passion there for me, to be sure.  I may try to whoop things up next month.  I don't know.

I do know that I write better stuff than anyone else there, though.  Better than the "featured reader" who butted in line and wrote lame poems about getting caught in traffic.

Hang off the edge of a cliff and tell me about it.  Tell me about fucking or death.  Tell me something and make me feel.  For god's sake, don't bore me.  Its a cardinal sin.

Poems about traffic compel me not.

The matriarch read some passionate poems about sex and betrayal.  Betrayal on her part of loves in her past.  Something about her resonates with qualities of other women I have known who assemble scene's around them and have interesting attitudes towards sex and fidelity.  Thank god I never slept with any of them, at least that I know of.  It would have been the end of my soul, and I would have loved it.  And them.

And one of the final readers was something interesting. A guy with huge five dollar sunglases, a large beltbuckle, blue jeans, cowboy boots, cowboy necktie and a hideously arbitrarily stripped predominantly organge button down collared shirt.  He got out of his mini van with a kid wearing a yellow with blue polka dot tie, tied about eight inches too short and signed up for the reading.

He looked to be in his forties but it was tough to say. Some of the mileage had been hard.

He got up and read earthy, horrible work, all in the "roses are red, violets are blue" meter and rhymescheme.  Seminal work about his wife's death, dysentery and country and western song theme's.  He looked about the room several times and his mind was open to me.  It said, "Where the hell is that boy."

Everyone listened politely except for those that went outside for a quick smoke break.

I hated his work but admired his courage in coming in from the redneck hinterlands to read.  Even as gaudy as his attire was, as shitty as his poems are, the goodness could lay within him.  It beats an unrepentant redneck who doesn't realize that there is something inherently wrong with his condition.

The time dragged, and I went and talked to amanda, who seemed to have some trouble talking to me, despite a genial desire to converse. 

The reading drew to a close and I went home.

Oh, and they told me that they're going to publish me in a local magazine.  One of my poems.

 

 


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