Rough Draft

After reading at fellow blogger Dick's site and Voice Alpha, a blog dedicated to the discussion of reading poetry aloud for an audience…

At the Poetry Reading

The lights flicker a warning to the audience.

Shuffling feet and shifting bodies settle.

Anticipation rises like smoke.

First up is Ian whose empty hands

are jammed in his pockets

like the damned up words in his mouth.

They spill together; his fists pound

the air, his words beat like fists,

pummeling, pulsating, until the

air in the room is purpled like a bruise.

Up and up his rising voice carries us,

setting us down in a different place where

the sudden silence is deafening.

Duncan makes his way to the stage

through the remnants of applause,

papers trembling in his trembling hands.

We lean forward as one, waiting

Duncan reads words like they are made

of feathers and music. When he is finished

the silence is a balm, a healing,

his honeyed words a blessing. His eyes

lift from the papers in his stilled hands

and he smiles.

Moira has a voice like stones dropping.

One after another her words fall. It hurts

to hear them.

Jean’s verse is worse.

Her rhyming and timing

are ghastly and slightly askew.

You wonder who taught her

to verbally slaughter

her words and then foist them on you.

Kevin never lifts his eyes from the page.

The last performer, Pete, brings a book

of his own verse. He holds it open in his

workman’s hands.

He does not read; he speaks, barely glancing

at the page. His eyes gather us in, 

include us in the story.

He becomes his poem, 

becomes the man he writes about,

becomes the passion and the sorrow

and the redemption at the end.