Open Mic Poetry Readings

[Angeline]

Another Choice

Boardwalk Life

Wildwood. Wild honky-tonk
strip that sizzles, smells
like fried onions and beer,
sounds like Bruce here.
Love to love you disco
and oldies cranked blasting
from booths and bars
filled with slick tan bodies
moving over gritty floors.

Here's how it works:

You get yourself a room
at the rooming house,
a job on the boards. Maybe
you run the Swiss Bob
or the Round-up, maybe
you wait tables at some trap
where the tips suck,
and Chuck the manager
always brushes by
too close with his palms out.

Lonzo the cook calls you Stuff.

Hey Stuff! Veal Parm!

He sneaks you shrimps, bites of steak
cause you're young and cute,
and he hates Chuck, too.

Split shift is best.
It's a no-sleep gig. Breakfast
tables, catch a few hours
on the beach, broiling
afternoons away

then hit the bars in droves
with other summer trash girls
in cutoffs, espadrilles, gold hoops.

You turn the beat around,
dance in your hot beach skin,
wailing with the crowd,
long neck in one hand,
fist raised, pumping the night beat
to local bands of wise guy South Side boys.
Tough-eyed. Soft-mouthed.

It's bread and circuses,
music, clink, and laughter,
quieting only when Sharkey
(that asshole) screams
at his very pregnant
teenaged wife that he wants her
to fucking dance. Now damnit,
but she cries and you feel sick,
so you leave.

You walk on the sand. Barefoot.
It smells clean here where waves crash
like life contracting, punctuated
by slurps, sighs. Underboard sex at 4 am.

It all feels so urgent and desparate,
this great suffocating need,
and you know then
this is why we run,
this is why we leave these ticky-tacky
New Jersey towns.

The sky is empty save for stars,
but they're as far away from the crush
of this carnival life
as you yearn to be.

 

[Angeline]

And this one--

the three were written within a very short time. I think they're meant to be together--though at an open mic, the three combined are probably too long.

Closing Time Redux

This bar has no name,
the sort of place you’d forget.

Not the Bird's Nest, that beacon
on the Delaware. I stood once
at that rail by the river,
me pale as light on the water,
thinking how beautiful
my old city looks when its grime
is painted with night,
when buildings sparkle
on the far bank

Not Elizabeth's
down the shore,
nor go-go Fekete's,
where I was always
so embarrassed
because everyone knows
I'm not the bar type.
(Never knew how to act,
who believe.)

You can believe it's true:
I'm likely more naive than you,
more naïve than these poems
might have you misconstrue.

But I’m here.

One more bar. One last night.
Someone sits in a booth alone,
looking out his one window
at moon. And his head full
of song, full of music, of poem.

In the pass of the train,
whistle blown, what else
could I do?

Take his hand.

Cmon Terence.
Time to go home.
Me and you.


What do you think? (I think Boardwalk Life is the best of the three, but I like them all--I don't have the perspective to pick, lol.)

 

[tungtied2u]

Another choice

Yeah...the Boardwalk one....that'll do nicely Ange.....

 

[flyguy69]

I like Boardwalk best, too, for its imagery and flow. I had trouble with the emotion, however, which may reveal naivete on my part. The shift from what seems like a pretty good time to me (cold beer on a hot beach, carefree employment, seaside sex at 4 AM) to the desparation that drives folks to leave New Jersey was too abrupt for me. It may, in fact, be real but I needed another stanza to get there. The folks at a Borders Bookstore in Maine may, too.

 

[Angeline]

I like Boardwalk best, too, for its imagery and flow. I had trouble with the emotion, however, which may reveal naivete on my part. The shift from what seems like a pretty good time to me (cold beer on a hot beach, carefree employment, seaside sex at 4 AM) to the desparation that drives folks to leave New Jersey was too abrupt for me. It may, in fact, be real but I needed another stanza to get there. The folks at a Borders Bookstore in Maine may, too.

I respectfully disagree.

To me, there's a thread of desparation that runs through that poem. It was a sense I was trying to build, beginning with a teenaged waitress who has to avoid gropes from the restuarant manager and depend on the cook for dinner, then moves to the drunken club scene and--to me--a rather horrying image (especially since I really saw it happen)--a teenaged boy verbally abusing his equally young and very pregnant wife from which the poet flees only to find another desparate situation--zipless fucks happening under the boardwalk. (Maybe it plays as a great time on this site, but Borders? God I hope not, lol. So when I say *This* is why we leave--I mean all of it, everything that builds up to that point. Maybe the problem is that "This" is not an expansive enough word to make it clear that I mean everything that precedes it, not just the stanza.

Do you think that would help? If I found a word or phrase that made that clearer?

Thanks!

 

[flyguy69]

I respectfully disagree.

With my comment? Or that I'm naive?

I am filtering the poem through my own experiences, of course, and (as has been discussed in many threads) coming up with my own very personal response.

High points in my life have been marked by the lack of responsibility associated with sizzling places that smell of fried onions and beer. But Bruce on the jukebox and hand me a free plate of shrimp and I'll grin like this ! I never got the feeling from this poem that other options didn't exist for her; with that the whole poem changes.

The scream scene is certainly frightening, but the silence around it suggested to me that it was unanimously condemned by the group, and therefore an aberration. It is, in fact, an interuption of "music, clink and laughter"; a positive image to me.

I'm not suggesting that it isn't "urgent and desparate", but it seemed that you made it so by saying it.

Zipless fucks in Borders? I've got to look up from my magazine once in awhile!

 

[Angeline]

The reading is next week

I'm gonna read Nightingale, this, and an edited version of Rhapsody in Muse. Is this a good idea? jd? You read a lot. What do you think? Anyone who knows these poems think it's a sucky combination?

After I Loved You

After I loved you
I became tiny. I could not
be seen I became microscopic,
so weak I could not be heard.

I became invisible and people walked past me.
I became a ghost and people walked through me.

I became a thing
you left on the hall table.
You forgot I was there.
For years I looked at the wall.
It was smooth and quiet and empty.
I pressed my face to it.
I could not scream.
I became smooth and quiet and empty.

There was nothing to say.

After I loved you
I became so small I was trapped.
I could not reach a chair in my own house.
I slid off the bed.
You walked past me 1,000 times,
but I was behind the dirty clothes,
caught in your blue flannel shirt.

I was a particle of food
that fell in a crack
on the dining room table.
I was a mote blown in the air,
landed with the other dust
on the glass of a photograph
of myself when I was me.

 

[Angeline]

Rhapsody in Muse

Daddy played opera.
La Boheme. Joan Sutherland
mezzo'd through the hi fi,
ringing past that vinyl scratch.
Bellini would be proud of her,
Handel cheering because La Stupenda
sings Roma to its knees.

I crossed mine, shut up
my ears, rode my Schwinn away
from that owl talk. True,
Brahms was cool, dig
Stravinsky's bones, dinosaurs
beaten in some other key,
trudging to extinction past
the dining room table,
slower, more stately
than grandparents.

Then one day a raucous howl,
a hoot of wide rhapsodic piano
rolls out sound big as cities,
my city, blinding avenues,
drill foot bustle sidewalks.

Oh Gershwin!

Play Manhattan skyscrapers straight up,
play downtown symphonies
filled with honk and streetlife,
night faces weary with wonder,
nonchalant but savvy, winking wisdom,
heartbeats drumming but contained
like me, edging sidewise
through alleys and traffic
until sometimes broken free,
dancing taps of midnight,
jazzy joy.

 

[Reltne]

Bump!

So what happened? How did the reading go? Did you post about it in another thread that I missed? Enquirering minds want to know!

 

[Reltne]

Bump!

What? No one knows. . . or cares? Was it that awful???

 

[tungtied2u]

Re: Bump!

What? No one knows. . . or cares? Was it that awful???

Angeline was sick.... so didn't attend. You couldn't actually believe she would be awful , could you?

But thanks for wondering....

 

[Reltne]

Re: Re: Bump!

Angeline was sick.... so didn't attend.B]

Stage frieght Huh?

You couldn't actually believe she would be awful , could you?

More likely "aweful".