To my embarassingly significant joy, I’ve gotten to hear the impressive D.J. Brewer read at both the Chatham book launch and at a separate launch event for Are You Free, the chapbook by him, Carolyne Whelan, and Kellee Maize. Brewer also runs the Steel City (Poetry) Slam at theShadow Lounge (9 p.m. every third Tuesday of the month). On D.J.’s invite, I’ve attended the slam competition for the last few months, with lead-dense literary poetry soaking up flop sweat in my coat pockets, while an extremely wide range of spoken word performers graced and/or cursed the stage. I finally scrounged together the courage and ramblitude necessary to write and then speak a piece last week. I scored so far into dead last that I approached the undead. My drink needed a chaser of brains. I nervously eyed the toothpicks for potential stakes. Much support from the other poets gave me hope of rejoining the living, and one of the finalists kindlybought a copy of my book, which went to cover the cost of the exorcism. In any case, below is my corpse-fresh first attempt at a slam poem outside of academia. I’m so far out of my element here that I need an extended zombie metaphor to explain the quality gap, if that’s any sort of warning.
Poltergeist Pittsburgh
The clouds are a pack of wet rats,
bedraggled and swimming upstream
from the sky’s sucking whirlpool
that they’ve made.
Pittsburgh is a sinking ghost ship.
And now, the weather report.
For Allegheny County, we predict
a high blood pressure front moving in
from the north. After moving in,
the high blood pressure front is expected
to hang around for years,
and to pick up girls over 21,
or winds over 25 miles per hour
in bars and coffee shops around town.
There is a 70% chance of participation
in illicit activities.
There is a 90% chance of horrible
poetry from yours truly in the middle of the night.
There is a 100% chance of lightning and nicotine-yellow rain
pissing down from giant, imaginary sky rats
onto towers made from iron tortured into steel
onto pavement made from the crushed
bodies of baby mountains
and onto automobiles running on the bile
of prehistoric rainforests and the blood
of pre-museum dinosaurs.
I repeat, there is a 100% chance of
recently-flattened pigeons riding
the oil-sweet rain runoff
from the middle of the road
to the gutter drains like
some murdered pirate
washing ashore.
Pittsburgh is a sinking ghost ship tonight
and we are stowaways onboard.
We are hiding in the rotting planks
and crouching in the corners of opened bar doors.
We are writing on the bedsheets
the spooks have left behind. We are spitting
through the scurvy on our lips,
we are singing while we’re drowning,
we are packing gunpowder in our hearts
and aiming our cannons at the clouds.
