Slam!

One more story like this. Happened on Thursday, before other events related here. I tell it briefly because the events of the night were special enough to me that I want to keep the memories just for me... (The writing here is to flex my atrophied writing instinct... The subject matter, generally arbitrary...)

I am at a so-called slam poetry night at a place called Manjaro. It's just around the corner from me but I don't know it from before, I found it on the internet... It's not like the open-mic stuff at the Foundry or what have you.

For a start about three-quarters of the faces here are black. What does this mean? People from hiphop or MCing circles... Then there are some from performance poetry circles... What they calling slam poetry. The crowd favourite here tonight wins £100, audience votes...

Everyone in the audience writes a word on a slip of paper and the master of ceremonies puts them in a bag. The score is, the contestants get up in the first round, they get three of these word papers, and have a minute to improvise something around those three words...

Up in front of the mic, third turn, is a girl. She is beautiful, and what else can I tell you about her right now? I gonna tell you nothing... She is having bad stage fright: "No, I can't do this shit. No, I'm not gonna do it."

"If you do it, I'll do it!" I offer her, and so she has to... She says her three words and sits down and that's that... I am left with an awful feeling of nausea spreading through my body, waiting for my turn...

I get up there, then. This is the first time I ever did any shit like this. The master of ceremonies welcomes Mike onto the stage... "Too many MCs, not enough Mikes, yeah?" I slur into the microphone. My three words: sunshine, innocence, bend...

Innocence with twisted faces
Sunshine in in-between places
Breathes deep, circulation races...
Lights fag, checks watch, paces, paces...

And I manage a few more lines and I got some sort of rhythm (I think?) and everyone is cheering and stamping... This is how the audience votes, by how loud their cheers are... And Mike gets, and this is the truth, the loudest damn cheers... "Do you have something ready, Mike?" asks the MC. "I got nothing!" says Mike and gladly give his place in the second round (3 and a half minute improvised rhyming) to someone else.... Next time, okay? So some black guy take the £100 tonight with an amazing stream-of-consciousness epic...

And after that the girls in the place really smiling at me but fuck them. Because the girl who was on the mic is called _____ but I gonna tell you nothing about her. We walk arm-in-arm a way up the street and then she just vanish into the underground and back to her life and say we gonna meet some day and she'll call and I don't know what or who it is in her life that she need to get back to so quickly.

She is the one who make Mike H take up writing rhyming words again.

So, it was like that.