Poetry Slam

When I was younger so much younger than today, I used to go to lots of poetry events. There was something called Red Sky that was every week, people were so very serious about it. Then one day I had an epiphany, "My god. I'm at a poetry event," and stopped going. Later it all became poetry slams. Went to a few of those, too, in awe of the awfulness. People with neither talent for acting, for reciting, for rapping, and certainly not for writing poems, put all these lack of talents together and had total support from audiences that consisted in the main of people only waiting for their turn. Once when I'd blessedly escaped from a typical slam, there was a homeless drunk across the street from the noisy venue. He was having his own private poetry slam. He kicked a telephone pole and screamed "Hello telephone pole!" stomped on the concrete and screamed, "Hello sidewalk!" then peered into a garbage can with "Hello garbage!" and shook the hell out of a newspaper vending machine, "Phuck you news!" It was a better poem than any that was being screamed inside at the slam.