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Thursday, April 08, 2004
Poetry Slam at The Lab
You feel embarrassed for their awkwardness, their jerky moves and ticks on stage, their hesitations and blunders, the shaky voice with which they read, their painfully honest and insecure prose. But I was like them, once upon a time. I once wrote a poem about giving him a blow job and then gave it to him. Oh the spunk I had in my younger days. He looked at me and kind of chuckled, the glint in his eye suggestive of recondite thoughts, if not pity. Somehow I wanted him to know, I wanted to crucify myself on his approval or lack thereof – something about high school brings out the melodramatic, the excruciating yearning for love & acceptance. But there are different ways to bare your soul, the kind that makes people wince and the kind that doesn’t. The former is mostly reserved for self-conscious types, but even the unself-conscious can fall prey. So I sat in the back making snarky comments about how very 17 their poetry was, meanwhile my dry mind looked for a drink. I wanted to be inspired and I was not. I wanted to see people who made me yearn to be entirely alive, not to waste a second not thinking, not breathing, not living. But then again, at least it was something. And something is better than nothing.
You feel embarrassed for their awkwardness, their jerky moves and ticks on stage, their hesitations and blunders, the shaky voice with which they read, their painfully honest and insecure prose. But I was like them, once upon a time. I once wrote a poem about giving him a blow job and then gave it to him. Oh the spunk I had in my younger days. He looked at me and kind of chuckled, the glint in his eye suggestive of recondite thoughts, if not pity. Somehow I wanted him to know, I wanted to crucify myself on his approval or lack thereof – something about high school brings out the melodramatic, the excruciating yearning for love & acceptance. But there are different ways to bare your soul, the kind that makes people wince and the kind that doesn’t. The former is mostly reserved for self-conscious types, but even the unself-conscious can fall prey. So I sat in the back making snarky comments about how very 17 their poetry was, meanwhile my dry mind looked for a drink. I wanted to be inspired and I was not. I wanted to see people who made me yearn to be entirely alive, not to waste a second not thinking, not breathing, not living. But then again, at least it was something. And something is better than nothing.
