Brief
background bit: one night last year I decided, on impulse, to go for a drive to get out of the house,
and to be unusually sociable. So I drove by myself through to Edinburgh and went to a Slam
Poetry evening I had heard aboot on Facebook.
This was a mistake.
I had never been to an evening like this before, and I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t figured on the fact that nearly everybody there would be half my age. Quite aside from this, was the fact that it was an overwhelmingly white, middle class, female-flavoured-and-favoured event. I was one of the oldest people in the room, and I'm in my 40s. There were around 30 people there, mostly young women, with the odd smattering of young hipster males, and a couple of guys who looked older than me. They probably got their AA meeting nights mixed up and ended here, confused and uncertain, sweating, thinking about nothing but that next pint or bottle. Least I hope that was the case.
I sat and jotted down the words that follow this intro for a laugh in the ten minutes before it started, chuckling to myself. I just wrote them with a pen and paper straight through in a oner, no forethought or stopping or rationalisation, as I like to do. Then the male emcee came on and declared the room a “safe space,” the usual American-imported braindead limpwristed rubbish.
One man was hear to moan out “Aw Jesus CHRIST!” in despair.
That man was me.
The contestants took the stage: five young women (late teens/early 20s) and one young guy in his early 20s. Probably sexually confused and playing the sensitive male feminist poet to get laid, or maybe another one who got his AA meeting night mixed up. Anyway. The first willowy ingénue did some poem aboot how she would always fighting the impossible fight, and blabbedy blah. My brain had already nearly closed down.
This was a mistake.
I had never been to an evening like this before, and I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t figured on the fact that nearly everybody there would be half my age. Quite aside from this, was the fact that it was an overwhelmingly white, middle class, female-flavoured-and-favoured event. I was one of the oldest people in the room, and I'm in my 40s. There were around 30 people there, mostly young women, with the odd smattering of young hipster males, and a couple of guys who looked older than me. They probably got their AA meeting nights mixed up and ended here, confused and uncertain, sweating, thinking about nothing but that next pint or bottle. Least I hope that was the case.
I sat and jotted down the words that follow this intro for a laugh in the ten minutes before it started, chuckling to myself. I just wrote them with a pen and paper straight through in a oner, no forethought or stopping or rationalisation, as I like to do. Then the male emcee came on and declared the room a “safe space,” the usual American-imported braindead limpwristed rubbish.
One man was hear to moan out “Aw Jesus CHRIST!” in despair.
That man was me.
The contestants took the stage: five young women (late teens/early 20s) and one young guy in his early 20s. Probably sexually confused and playing the sensitive male feminist poet to get laid, or maybe another one who got his AA meeting night mixed up. Anyway. The first willowy ingénue did some poem aboot how she would always fighting the impossible fight, and blabbedy blah. My brain had already nearly closed down.
Second girl started off some poem aboot stalking her ex through Facebook and started effing and ceeing and blinding (she was a real mother's girl type, and I thought damn, here she is, rebelling against her parents in public by - GASP! - swearing and dragging the good family name through the mud! Gosh, how awful!) and I just got up and left. Hope she thought she offended me and drove me from the place. She did, but not in the 'edgy' way she would have liked. Two narcissist young female poems-aboot-themselves too many. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong word-crime. Sham Poetry is a mistake I will not make again; I don't like slumming it with word-spammers and scammers.
As I said, I just jotted down a few random satiric words before I got the Hell out of there. I know myself, I wouldn’t have been able to hold my tongue, it was just best for all the fragile flowers there if I just left. Below is what I wrote. It’s all a joke. As was that night. I want my fucking petrol money back!
CLICHÉ BUFFET
Twentynothings, geeks freaks creeps weirdos,
asskissers, glorygrabbers, slimelight stealers, no-daddy-love squealers, dead
pony trauma carriers, reality fighters, zits and no tits and no-sex hips
tilting at nothing but expressive windmills, sex war rejects that failed the
physical, Glen or Glenda, chaste inattention whores, phonesuckers,
thumbsuckers, never-fuckers, teddybear backpackers, mugglefuckers, one-time
stoners, fudgefingerers, pen tamperers, scenestormers, bifocal cunt slantists,
look but don't touch or lookers, angstcrackers, no-threat shiverers, impossible
spineless bipeds, bikeriders, Quasimodo bellringers, bullshitfighters,
snotrocketeers, needy nerds, unshaven ravers, superzeros, angst-tappers, craft
fear drinkers, slobbergobbers, dick touchers, middle class toddler
chair-rockers, wordfailers, storykillers, trust fund anarchists,
never-bookreaders, vitality bleeders, mummy's-hug-needers, flee minute warning,
asymmetrical gene crashes, angular faces, no real life traces,
safe-from-talent-spaces, clashing colours, fashion losers, scarecrow
aesthetics, dare-to-bare-no-soul rows, poetic abortion recorders,
personality-free disorders, no-talent-tracers, one-wine whiners, unsixtyniners,
tamed windbreath El Ninos, unsafe empty headspaces, dead art disgraces,
mutilated muses, shoegazer abusers, cliched-phrase users, teen scream melodrama
queens, mirror-practicers, weepstorm
producers, stick a cock or skewer in 'em they're done.Aye, I am cruel. So what? They will never see it. Best poem I saw of the night was written on a wall in biro on the Royal Mile:
TINA HEAD
DIRTY COW
+
THIEF
It was a foggy night in Edinburgh, so I even wasted a few words on that too:
FOGGY DREICH REEKIE
Edinburgh under
silent assault from a
ghost-focus meteorological cataract
Blurring boundaries
Erasing histories
Spoiling tourist views
Renewing possibilities.
So you see, I should have stayed behind and read to the angsty artytypes of all sexes and shapes and colours. They would have loved it.
Or maybe not. :)
END
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