Not the America I Know

"If you don't like it, there's the f**king door!"

So said the M.C. of a comedy open mic last night at my favorite cafe. This after one of his comics had shouted at a couple of paying customers . .

"Will you shut the f**k up!"

The patron, thus addressed, ducked so quickly for the door it was hard for the eye to follow—the last straw for me, one of the only regulars at the cafe who continued to show up for what some of us had dubbed "Tragedy Night". The M.C. had regularly shushed us during performances.

Quieting paying customers because they're not paying attention to your terrible show? So I shouted at the comic from the back of the room that he couldn't tell us to shut up, that this was our place. An exchange ensued, which resulted in heckling on my part.

Some of his comments, after screaming primally into the mic for several seconds—making the point that he could drown me out, he had the power—including a threat to do me physical violence with the microphone apparatus. I invited him down off stage.

A spew of expletives on the vile nature of my personage including the delightful . .

"I wish your mother had aborted you!"

After this had gone on for some time, a barista came to my table and informed me that if I "disrupted again" I would have to leave.

After the show I asked the M.C. if I heard him right, that his attitude was essentially "there's the f**king door". "Damn right," he replied. More heated discussion ensued whereupon I received another warning. When I kept it up I was asked to leave, and the barista made a show of calling the police. An M.C. who forces you to be quiet through his bad show, and a policeman who tosses you out if you complain.

That's not the America I know.

They Like My Short Stuff

Having gotten into this whole poetry thing by making a left turn from a longish song lyric that a meddling M.C. thought might make a poem instead--and, truth be told, desirous of creating LITERATURE--at open-mic readings I would regularly lead off with my long stuff.

That's what got me named "poet laureate" at Rapunzel's coffee shop in Lovingston, Virginia. The owner enjoyed my "Confession" (perhaps he's Catholic, too), and later my "Have You Ever" (a longish prose poem).

One night a couple friends and I threaded the dark country roads of Central Virginia to an open mic for musicians and comedians at Rapunzel's. A musician had been kind enough to arrange one of my lyrics and told me he would perform that night for the throngs. Once there, however, my singer-songwriter-aspiring-stand-up-comedian friend informed me that he would NOT be performing music. He'd decided to do his comedy instead.

Traipsing upstairs to use the antique salesroom as backdrop for a private-audience rendition of my song, we must have caught the eye of the M.C. that night who tossed out:

"Hey mister poet! You wanna do some of your stuff tonight? How 'bout some short poems in between acts?"

Normally this sort of request would fill me with dread as I don't tend to memorize anything I write (and don't seem to have the mind for memorizing anyone else's stuff, either). But the night before, as luck would have it, I'd shown up at a reading without my customary sheaf of paper and when asked to perform had had to resort to whatever short stuff I could recall.

To make a long story short, I agreed to get up there at Rapunzel's (being a real trooper) in between singer-songwriters. Before I did, though, I ran through the handful of short poems I could remember off the top of my head, things I wouldn't normally read at all to a crowded room. When I did step up to the mic in front of this room full of musicians they seemed to get a real kick out of it. Two of them asked if they could work with me arranging my lyrics.

Happy day! That's what I'd been after that night anyway.

As a result of my performance that night I got invited up on the mountain in Montebello a couple of times for a July 4th Woodstock-like celebration. Me the sole poet amongst a bunch of punk musicians.

I suppose if you consider the quatrains I've written, the sonnets, and even some of the shorter rhyming pieces I've classed with longer poems, my shorter pieces way outnumber the longer. But, I still prefer, if given the chance, to get wound up on one of my narrative poems, attention deficit or no.

Real Men Don't Write Poems About Cats

Or at least that's what I thought until a little bundle of orange fur tumbled out of a hedgerow in Charlottesville, Virginia and onto my sidewalk path.

I didn't think too much of it then, as I was distinctly not a cat person at that point. But then he showed up on the doorstep when I checked out a nearby place to live. My future roommate said: "If you see that cat again bring him in. He can live here."

I didn't have to follow up on this directive as the cat showed up again on the doorstep the day I moved in. I guess you could say he chose me.

Since that day I've felt compelled to pen numerous verses about him, such as the eponymous "Albuquerque".

At Last to Gibbon

After many years of saying I would--I must--get to Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I've finally cracked a page or two.

I can tell you right off it's gonna be a life-changing book; I can just feel it.

The longer story of all the copies I've passed up over the years, put on hold but never paid for, paid for but returned should perhaps be saved for a rainy day over a bowl of soup.

"The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare"

With so much discussion regarding who in fact might have written the body of work known today collectively as "Shakespeare", it's comforting to know I long ago figured it out.

You can read all about it right here.

Not to say he wrote all of it. The quality's too varied in spots for that. Just that he wrote the biggest chunk of it.

But don't take my word for it.

Just a Good Little Catholic Boy

Being just a good little Catholic boy at heart, I find the ongoing composition of the Supreme Court interesting indeed.

Though we have an Evangelical-style Protestant administration in the White House, they keep pulling Catholics for the job. With the two Jews already there, and the four Catholics--including the only black man--we have a trend developing here.

Add Alito to the list, consider the remaining Episcopalian justices practice a faith often called "Anglo-Catholic", remember that Stevens and O'Connor both have Catholic spouses . .

Could it be just that Jews and Catholics are the only ones maintaining a proper focus on high-quality education?