5/9: I am spiraling still from yesterday, dehydrated and filled fully to a kind of beveled edge brim. I am thinking of the goblets of glass at the Press Room w/ an absurd $13 red wine, but when I tell you everything, everything else was a dressed up dream ~ psychedelic in the overlap. Dream and Awake and the hazy dazy life between, the imperfect line in the trampled sand.
My throat is still raw from it this morning. I am not always so smooth coming out I’ve been doing my exercises, performing vowels and swallowing life dry. You’ll hear me. I let myself hear me, now, on stage where I face the black of you. The band plays on, plays on. I stand in the purple lights and ask for what I want, sprouting from the Earth. I’ve got pearls tied to my hip in honor of a kind of fertility, the parent I am meant to be, spitting up on stage, smiling. I draw your attention down and in awe and I don’t even think about it. I say all your favorite words in ways you haven’t yet heard.
The poster for the event had a naked Queen of Pentacles, Burton-esc, looking like she swallowed colloidal silver w/ a coin at her hip. The Mouth himself invited us down to read poetry and to play, his lover created the art for the poster.
I first saw this small city when I was falling into words and running away in that small town way. You know, somewhere else for a while and a good 45 minute drive. This is where I would go to not be home, this small sister city by the sea. I waved like an old friend. The sun slipped. The flowers bloomed on the strawberry bushes. The seabreeze looked behind us, heading North. MC drove and I smoked. We just blew in from the city for the night, weaving words and causing ruckus. MC was a spark and I had an ungovernable gust inside of me, ready to blow. I imagined the trees playing telephone w/ the flames, I imagined more reasons for us to travel and read and run. I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing all night. MC seems always to know what she is doing, aware and in control. She keeps control across from respect on that little seesaw in the sand. We changed the city for the night, by simply being ourselves. We were changed for the night, everyone around us simply themselves. Art in the room and artists. Music in the room and magic.
This small, seabrushed city less than an hour from mine, it has become precious to me over time. Small city, I saw you young and you saw me younger. And well, I just blew into town about an hour ago, I throw my words into the dirt below the cobblestones. I was loved in this city a few hours at a time young, young - the way the good stays good once the whole deal sours, the way I am smiling even before I close the car door behind me. It’s undeniable, love still follows me on any walk that dips behind Market Street, ghosts of the past weightless and sweet.
We stay away from the water’s edge and I kick up petals on the street saying to this city, catch me up to speed! I’ve been communing w/ poetry and digging into the ground. Are you still making music? And is it true, are you in love? Old friend made of salt, you know I’ve only wanted happiness for ya. I’m back for the night and I am grown, a silk shirt all slouchy on the shoulders and studded clogs. Have I told you life has gotten deeper since we last spoke? Since wetter winters and desire asleep in doubt? Oh yeah, I’m here w/ a friend. I’m here to read some poetry. I’m here w/ a friend of mine and we are here early, no surprise, we are like family, dreaming together in the dark corner.
The green room was gray and there were 7 of us all tight in there. A wall of polaroids of who has come through, the locals and artists and opportunists, history history history. I choose peace easy knowing I am one of many, on the wall or just in the room. I ask for what I want in the gray green room. I tell the musicians to play something w/ an African beat, ancient. I tell them, sex, Death and dirt. I don’t know if anyone really gets the dirt thing but they love it and I can’t get off it. My words are simple, spit out by the mud of me. More than anything the music needs to know its age.
The Mouth was all smiles and the musicians wanted to play. MC and I found some tables nestled up front, a couple friends came to sit and support, Yella Belly and the Fairy. Four of us sat w/ poems and wine like good little poets. It’s clear that the Mouth values the magic and the immersion. We were in for a show - better, we were part of the show.
There was a birthday, candles blown out and a full house. The show opened w/ a band of friends playing a familiar type of song made new, the kind that is soft and insistent, angst as it skids into 30. Musicians raised near farmlands and the forest, putting their feelings into use. Three friends playing together, getting back into it, barefoot on the the drum petals and kisses all gentle on the microphone. The PA here is better than I am used to. I can hear the performers perfectly from my seat but I can hardly hear myself on stage; this I like. The band showcased some new songs and the crowd was captive. On the projector, visuals of lilies blooming slow and devil horns in silhouette, then swirling tunnels of the stage itself, extending reality back, back through the walls interdimensional.
Then the stage belonged to the poets. It was cleared except for the mic and the gold drum set. The musicians had different moods for each. A frothy guitar and a tempo that oozed. Then a jazzy beat that led the words along, sinister and playful. MC read to a rhythm naked and powerful and alone, cherry red and jet black and a glint of gold, a girl who knows her colors. The Mouth closed the show and picked the microphone stand up, swinging it around, swinging himself around, hair in his face in his face, words from his mouth from the mouth of the Mouth. The guitars grew bold, knowing this poet, knowing their cues. He screamed about silence, banishing even the possibility of silence in a world left screaming.
When I was up there, I couldn’t parse the beat and didn’t spend too much time trying to find it, rather I led it through like the winding thing it was. Something known and unknown, felt and found and ambient. I trusted the tempo that found me as it found itself, steady. The drums beat on, beat on and I dropped my floating words to the floor until they were gone, strewn on the stage like my red scarf strewn on the stage, like these pieces of me and the mud I let you see.
I pulled my dirty heart from the ground last night from the root. I held it out and carried it around saying, these are the spaces I want to be in all the time, all the time.
I spent the night over-friendly and unafraid. I thought again of electricity, of sparks and flow, of the same stuff I am made of. When the show was over, I helped bus the tables and stayed in conversation, asking my questions and saying, thank you. I am only ever curious. I was told, you’ve clearly done this before and you’ve got your own rhythm, your own groove and style. I was given short tours of tattoos and detours of happenstance, of what brought each of us out tonight. Turning around, I caught the place quiet after the echoes. Everyone went downstairs where the bar was just getting busy and the kitchen was about to close. MC got fries and I smoked some more. I went outside outside, where the rain had stopped and the sky winked, granting a wish.
I talked w/ a boy who said his favorite word was wet, and you said it like, a thousand times. I talked to the opener about his time away from making music and the bassist about the rock club in my city. I blew clouds and watched as they became fog, saying something about how words sometimes felt like theft, like robbery, more like boxing than art, saying something like where poetry works to define, music works to release. The singer knew how to reach beyond words into feeling. The drummer knew only the beat. I came w/ boxes around all my words, shaking them to make sound, vibrations we could all feel into together.
I was talking to artists, off leash. I was talking to people who learned to care in these meticulous, meaningful ways, who hold creation above their heads in the floods. We talked about the joy of the thing, joy and love and money and chance, where we come from and where we hope to be going. Bartenders and teachers and social workers, artists and risk takers and apartments around the corner.
Inside, the bar was just a bar now and we were just outtatowners under a twinkling sky. MC and I at each other's sides, having each other's backs, riffing like we grew up together. We kiki’d w/ the Mouth, messy w/ dreams. We talked of poetic and delicate and destructive things, feral and changing shapes, finding balance. We were artists experimenting w/ symbiosis, w/ collaboration, w/ experience itself. We agreed it was more than worthwhile to consider what enhances the words, the poetry, the art, not what drowns it out or distracts from it. We agreed this was one show of many for us to share the stage together, strange ideas brewing for a bubbling future.
Our night was on wings, unsinkable. Everyone already knew I was covered in mud. They looked at me like maybe I was easy to love. I looked at the small city in the fog under the moon like a version of home.
Here, the artists are all dreamers under streetlights, illuminated and clearing the hazy dazy way to another night where we bloom together, another night where we all hear each other so clearly.
This is definitely a deviation from the Workshop and what I typically share on the podcast, but I was am so thankful to be invited to readings near and far and to be seen as an enthusiastic and experimental poet in my community, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.
I am a bit of a purist when it come to the experiential side of art and poetry, believing that some performances and experiences should be saved and held by those who show up for them. At the same time, I want to honor the opportunities that find me. I want to celebrate each spark and share w/ those who are unable to make it to these types of things. After all, accessibility and celebration are cornerstones of my creative creed.
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A page I dog-eared from my Nightmares & Morning Pages series from a night spent damn near perfectly~ thank you for reading, for listening, for following along.
Mud in Drag & A Night All Electric