Poetry Slamed
Sheffield stainless-steel scissor ice cream scoop. Low Lying Fruit. Take it, I don’t want it anymore. Art as dumping ground. Sounds good to me. As long as it’s not framed. The stakes are low. Perhaps they always are, even when they are high. And I can’t breathe. It’s all in your hands. Generosity too. The scoops with the handle that you squeeze that makes the metal belt run over the ice cream and release it into a perfect ball. The one that we got that didn’t work. The one that promised perfection. The one that took time to create the image of pleasure before us burgeoning addicts misused it, or deferred to the speedier option - the stainless-steel dessert spoon that worked fast enough to defy its purpose, far too expedient in its task. Pleasure got too easily. We ate so quickly, that the ice cream was gone from the time we walked from the counter to the table. (You have a counter and a table?) Aesthetics. Say wha? Greedy, needy, bastards, all, and forever more.
One girl with green tipped hair introduced herself and her poems, saying that she is obsessed with death. She was making a very good job of living. Or a good show. Having fun on the stage. And with a beat. A confidence. A pulse. Strong enough to be a turn on. Soil in her gut. Another woman, who is a published poet and who was co-hosting the event, spoke about her mother being stranded in the house in the country after their car was totalled by a crash with a drunk driver. The accident left her single mother, in a ‘desert storm’. All the simple things became hard. A war. I thought about Bruno Dumont’s Flanders and fellow control freaks but that doesn’t really fit, but the tone was right. Another reader looked like Bonnie Langford, flashes of panic and published. She wore a big bow in her hair, a mini skirt and knee socks, pretty signifiers, and read poems about courage. I want to be a big strong woman like my mother. Is she mother fucking, hustling me, or am I wilfully conflicted?
Some of the poems were about love. Or perhaps more than that. They said, “I see you”. One man could not stop telling his wife how much he loved her. Is he guilt ridden? Whilst others grappled with the scoop. They were my favourite. Grappling with faith but doing it anyway. The stainless-steel scissor ice cream scoop and the rusty Stanley knife, from collar bone to gut, opening ourselves up, puncturing our lungs, then squeezing the handle, desperately trying to get the metal belt into heat, to see the piecemeal pink lung lump, (think of them as non-smokers) drop onto the floor so that they could say, “Have it. I’m done with it. I don’t want it anymore. But at least it looks good. A perfect ice cream sphere.” Only for the adjudicator to say, “we only want words”, at which point the poet, moving in bits and starts now, rubs the spherical piece of lung on the floor, marking out letters that spell “cunt”. Then says, “Is that word enough for you?” The adjudicator says, “Works well with the rarefied banality.” The poet collapses. Worth dying for. I think.
When I got up to tell The Body & Blood I ran out of breath. Excuse me, please. Forgive my poor mouth. FFS. The mic (mike?) distracting. I got as far as Maggie’s revelation that to get out of her future marriage, she just had to pretend to be a slut, but it was enough to see what needs to be done over the coming weeks, apart from slitting my wrists, breathing wise, like stop, before Maggie comes out. As Maggie.
On the way out one woman, who was a first timer, like myself, gave me encouragement and said vehemently, “Just do it! Just do it!” She was painfully thin. Earnest. Going through something that was ravaging her, offering it to me with kindness. It was straight. No curves. No embellishment. No audience. No need. A gift. A Church of Ireland Minister told me how much he liked The Body & Blood. Just as well I didn’t reach the part about eating him.
