Poetry & Performance, Part 2

I give all of you permission to smack me on the head for being such a whiny idiot in my last entry.  Last night, I was commissioned to read poetry for Mental Health Awareness Day and it went fine.  I ended up writing the two poems I read about an hour before I actually read them because even though Melissa and Jamie liked the ones I had planned, I had this intuitive sense that they wouldn’t do.  Actually, I’m still proud of myself so….

Hershey Park in the Rain
 
The best time I ever had at Hershey Park,
it was 40 degrees and a half hour till close
and Dana and I decided to ride Tidal Wave.
We barely knew each other, but I was the only
one brave enough and stupid enough
to go with her. The wind blew through our
drying t-shirts as our plastic painted log
mounted up the steep climb. “We’re the two
craziest bitches on the planet,” she told me
right as we reached the top, seeing the lights
outlining the roller coaster, no turning back now.
I laced fingers with her, and we screamed
the entire way, crashing into the wall of water
like cymbals, laughing because it just felt
so good, so incredibly good, so wet-t-shirt-
plastered-to-your-body-teeth-chattering good,
so good, that the rest of the clean dry chorus kids
on our bus could poke fun at our shivering,
and we still felt lucky because they’d never know
just how good it felt to be the only two
people crazy enough to do it.

A Whole New World
 
His name is Joseph, his tollbooth
is lane 3. I do not know his favorite song
because whenever I pull up, I blast
Aladdin from a Disney Hits soundtrack,
and we sing a duet. Forty-five seconds
of “A Whole New World” belted out
over the rumbling of the trucks on 78,
Joe in his neon yellow traffic smock,
and me in my sweatshirts. Not that we’re
any good or that anyone can hear us
over that kind of noise, but why should only
the talented singers have a monopoly on something
so exhilarating? Just seventy-five cents
and forty-five beautiful seconds
of off-key duet on 78, forty-five seconds
of a whole other world that linger
as I drive towards Bethlehem.

A little simple, a little too prose in style, a little cliche, but given that the direction they gave me was to write something that "celebrated life" for Mental Health Awareness Day no less, it’s begging cliche.  And considering that I wrote these in a half hour, I think I did pretty well.  And the actual reading went quite well also, so I feel good.

Julie and Adrian helped me out on Sunday also.  Julie read the piece Saturday night for the open mike and loved it.  It’s not a slam poem, but it has this great "written on crack" feel to it and I could turn it into a slam poem…..a slightly conservative slam poem, actually.  And Adrian, who ran the event, told me that the guest poet mentioned me in the car ride to the hotel (mostly just to ask if everyone in the audience was Republican, but still, he remembered me!) and he told me about a guy named Jack McCarthy who slams haikus.  If he can slam haikus, maybe I can slam….whatever the hell I write…But anyway, the weather on Sunday also helped.  When its 70 something degrees and you blow off all forms of responsibility to read an amazing book outside with a great friend (Julie), and you are wearing an incredibly sexy outfit, you can’t help but feel fantastic.