spoked word

Last night, my roommate guilted me into seeing him perform at a spoken word performance. Now, I like spoken word, but I can only take fifteen minutes or so at a time before I start to bite the skin off the inside of my lip in frustration. I hate that half the people read their poems off a piece of paper, or out of a notebook, and they stumble over their own punchlines, because they haven't taken the time to practice before jumping on stage and shouting at me. I hate that people use their crack-voices to read their poems. Loud, manic screaming, mixed with paranoid mumbling. People who talk like that usually eat at soup kitchens.

Anyway, my roommate did a piece too, and it was pretty damn creepy. His poem was about his unending desires to defile the bodies of innocent victims, and how he sometimes stands over me when I am sleeping and fights the urge to rip me open and bath in my innards. Everybody in the audience thought it was some sort of political metaphor, because he kept shouting "nigger" every so often when reading, and there was that one guy in the audience who thinks everything that ends in a pause is deep, so he has to say something like "yeah, brother!" or "uh-HUH!" just to show that he GETS it. People were applauding him when he finished, like this was a statement, and not just my formerly homeless, undead, and probably racist roommate. Me, I was thinking about maybe adding more garlic to my diet.

The night wasn't all bad, though. There was a really awesome spoken word using Oregon Trail as a metaphor for picking up women (I'll never look at covered wagons the same way again).

dls