(Note: All names, locations and poetry have been changed so I don’t get my ass beaten down by angry people with creative facial hair)
.........................................

There's nothing like a weekend in Losertown.

I like to leave town on weekends. One of the good things about Albany is that it's near everyplace in the northeast, which makes fleeing relatively easy. After a week of selling hotdogs or whatever the hell it is I do, I like to get out because there are a lot of places I may never get to see when I move away. That, and I don't have a lot of, you know, friends.

Most months, I stick around town for one weekend, when I recharge. Sometimes I use those days to explore Albanian culture – its fascist architecture, its gargantuan shopping mall, its drunken state employees, its Indian food served by surly waiters. More often than not, though, I stay in my apartment, my existence a testament to man’s overcoming the need to go outdoors. I’ve got everything I need: Walls to stare at, 2000 (yes, 2000) channels on my television, and the easy level of video hockey, which allows me to keep my ego artificially inflated. Sometimes I’m only wearing one sock, which I keep on for 36 hours.

Hard as it is to believe, despite those diversions, sometimes I find myself feeling vaguely homicidal by the time Sunday evening flows in.

It was one of those weekends. I found myself yelling and pointing aggressively from my chair at Andy Rooney as he complained about barking dogs or rainy days or something on 60 Minutes. I paused for a second, looked around, and right then realized that I had to find something to do before I started pissing on the electrical sockets. I turned to the Internet.

The only thing happening was a poetry reading at the bar around the corner from me. Not to be indelicate, but, in my eyes, the only thing worse than half-drunken poetry is a prostate exam. But my desperation for something to do was such that I threw on pants, a sock and two non-matching shoes and headed to the Madisonian to hear the local wannabe Ginsbergs.

The performance space was on the second floor, above the bar, so I walked up, surveyed the crowd, saw an audience with the kind of self-satisfied sheen that only high high school students and cool college kids can cast, and promptly went back downstairs to buy myself two or three beers. Properly armed, I went back up and hunkered down.

About ten minutes before the start of the evening, the fifty seats were half-filled with people wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and Gap pants. Strangely enough, with the smirk on my face and the pints of beer flowing down my throat, the seat next to me was one of the last ones to fill. A twenty-someodd-year-old woman came in with a group of friends, but their table filled up so she sat next to me.

“Hey,” she said to me in the tone you use when forced by proximity to acknowledge someone else’s presence. She wriggled out of her coat.

“Hey,” I shot back, eager to make contact with someone – for the first time that weekend – who didn’t appear in Internet pornography. She was dressed in black, like a Vietcong with designer eyewear.

“You performing tonight?”

“Nah,” I said. “I live near here and The Sopranos was a rerun. You?”

“No, no, no. A friend of mine is. You into poetry?”

I had a millisecond decision to make. Her close-cropped hair and fuck-you bangs said she was artistic, in which case, yes, I was most definitely into poetry. But the straight line her mouth made, refusing to form anything that hinted at emotion, said she was just a cynic out to laugh at others, in which case, God, no, I hated poetry. I played mental Pong for a second: Artist or cynic, artist or cynic?

“Huge poetry fan. It’s so…expressive,” I said. Huge gulp of beer.

She raised an eyebrow, then winced, bit her lip, and exhaled.

“Not this shit,” she said.

“Oh, well, yeah. No, definitely not..”

“You ever write any?”

“Not really. Just a little in high school.”

“What about?”

What about? What does anybody in high school ever write poetry about? Being fucking miserable.

“I wrote about, you know, life and shit. All the shit that was, uh, happening to me. Coming of age.” Coming of age? What the hell was this turning into, one of those Growing Pains hour-long specials?

“Coming of age,” she said, rolling the words out of her mouth, tasting them and appraising them. She spat them back out. “Coming of age,” she repeated.

I was choking in verbal mustard gas. I didn’t expect to get her phone number. I didn’t expect to marry this girl. I was just hoping not to humiliate myself – especially when other people were going to be willingly humiliating themselves up on stage in a few minutes.

“What’s your name?” I was trying to get the conversation back into calm waters.

She looked at me, looked down, and shook her head once. “It’s not important,” she said.

I sat back in my seat, crossed my legs, drank some beer and waited for the show to start. Soon enough, a young guy, so thin I found myself wondering how he was able to walk, got on stage. He was dressed from beret to bottom in camouflage.

“Hey, hey! You guys ready to poetry?”

Yes, he was using “poetry” as a verb. More beer. The audience, more game than I, mumbled its agreement.

“I said, are you ready to poetry?”

The audience mumbled a little louder. Half-drunk and all-mortified, I was ready. Anything to distract myself.

“Me, too, and so are all these other ugly motherfuckers lined up right here,” he said, pointing with his thumb at the poets’ corner, which was, in fact, filled with ugly motherfuckers. “OK. First up, we got a good friend of mine. He’s got a lot to say, and most of it’s pretty unhappy. Here’s James Furmer.”

James Furmer got up and just scowled at the audience for a few seconds. No words, no good-to-be-heres; just a scowl, like we’d tried to eat his grandmother. It was as if he had been promised a different audience, and now that he saw the one he was stuck with, he was pissed.

“This one’s about globalization,” he said. “It’s called ‘Embargoed Lives.’”

Thanks to the wonders of self-promotion and the stack of third-generation photocopies James had left by the door, I was able to get an exact copy:

I feel the dark darkness
of the light
of your fingers
E.T. fingers
on my Jaws chest
as I eat
cheese
and as I play
the songs of a thousand
oppressed
peoples
on my sitar.

Monkey.

Rapturous – rapturous! – applause buried the room, as forty-eight people nodded their heads. I finished my first beer and looked to the chick sitting next to me. She was rubbing her face with her hand, Monday morning-style.

James went on for another ten minutes, jumping from the horrors of being a carnivore to the terrors of cars and over to the dearth of good programming on the TV. Fun stuff for a Sunday.

The next poet finally took over. Her name was announced as Graciella Mirth, and she seemed to float on stage like an afterthought. She wore the kind of black dress that wouldn’t have been out of place in a formal photograph from the 1880s, and her hair, dyed black, flew out in clumps at mysterious angles, like each one was stretching. She looked at the audience, her eyes accusing us of depraved indifference to whatever unimaginable pain she had suffered in high school – not being invited to the prom or whatever.

“No one feels the ache. No one knows the sorrow of the candle as it is burned, burned down unless you are a candle. It burns, down to nothingness, and then it is gone. And so I write haiku.”

I can’t breathe when I’m
Stuffed in the locker by kids
Better-liked than me
___

I only wear black
Because my soul can’t handle
The Long Island life

No one applauded when she finished. I flagged the waitress down, ordered another two beers and drank. My tablemate, head in hand, just stared at the six multicolored stage lights hanging from the ceiling. “God, that was fucking terrible,” I said to her, giving our future one last chance and basing it on the horrible art of a 19-year-old with emotional problems.

“It certainly wasn’t good,” she said before turning her head away.

The emcee came back on. “This next guy is another good friend of mine – good friend of a lot of people here – and a good friend of the Albany poetry community. He’s doing some amazing work, trying to fuse poetry..." He paused and went from face to face, letting us in on a secret. "...with music.”

Now three-quarters drunk – I hadn’t had any dinner yet and Yuengling had dissolved whatever embarrassment I felt earlier – I raised my hand. After a handful of really shitty poets, I was feeling a little punchy. The emcee looked a little surprised to be taking questions and pointed at me, unsure. I asked him, “Yeah, um, wouldn’t mixing poetry and music just be, you know, a song?”

He looked offstage for confirmation. The audience looked at me. Everything paused in midair for a half-second. “No,” he said. “Here’s Eric McIntosh.”

Eric McIntosh came on, and underneath his long, stringy Fidel beard, it looked like he was smiling. The chick next to me looked like someone had slipped something in her drink. Looking around, all the other women appeared equally transfixed.

He opened up a notebook and hunted for the right page. He found it, looked up, and said, “This one’s called ‘Mixture.’”

Mixture
Mixture mixture mixture
Mixture
Mix-
-ture
Mix-
-ture
Mix-ture
Ture-mix
Mixture
Mixture
Mixture

(Pause)

Mixture.

Thank God the applause was loud enough to cover my uncontrollable laughter. Everyone in the room – and the women in particular – was clapping and cheering as if Jesus himself had come down and started performing party tricks. I swear, more than a handful of people were masturbating at their tables.

I was in shock, because, by any objective measure, that poem had royally sucked the dick. But even more shocking was the reaction of the woman sitting next to me. I turned to her, confident that she, like me, would be sitting in gape-mouthed horror. She was anything but. Instead, she, originally joyless, angry, and utterly unapproachable -- someone you would think hates everything -- was crying and clapping, moved by I-have-no-idea-what. Black had turned white, sane had gone crazy.

I got up, drunk, in shock, and said to her, “God, that was just…I need to leave.”

She looked up at me, paused, and painted on the most condescending face she could make. She said, “It must be really hard for you going through life without any taste.”

She had no idea.