NaPoWriMo April 2014

Open mic nights are a good way to review and test the sound of your poems on an audience. They attract every kind of poet except very serious "page poets" but even they will sometimes read in "floor-spots" at book launches of other authors' work. Here is my irreverent and I hope not too cruel verse about the poetry nights we go to which feature open mic slots. (it's not really Open Mic Month - though we have every other kind of Month, so why not?)

Tuesday 
April 15th

NaOpMiMo

It’s National Open Mic Month
Stand up and let us hear it
For the slammers and the ranters
Who rhyme till you can’t bear it,
For the sensitive young chanters
Of songs to loves they’ve lost
And reciters of long mantras
To the gods in whom they trust.

Let’s have a real big hand
For the brave and the confused,
The writers in the sand
Whose poems are infused
With the politics of now
And the fantasies of might be
And their theories of how
The world could change, and nightly

Let’s praise the hosts and M C’s
Who make room upon their stages
For the thousand poets writing
Who don’t earn any wages.
Let's have a silence, thinking 
Of bars and halls and pubs
Where punters gather drinking  
Expensive beer in clubs,


Entertained by stand-up poets’ arts
Of every race and creed
Who open up their mouths and hearts
And generously pay to read:
Let's stay each long-drawn evening
And watch the poets bleed
And let's admit that we too have
our own obsessive need.


© Janice Windle