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.
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