tea embroidery baby seal club

The other evening at Tea Embroidery Baby Seal Club, where people stand and read things from pages they've written on buses, in kitchens, or those lappy toppers favoured lately by munie-knowers, we were told there was absolutely no reading your own poetry, no no no, not allowed at the start. Hand gestures were also involved, a palm held up like someone stopping on a bicycle.

People who wished to read had to swap a poem with a stranger, a kind of blind art dating (and perhaps, a good way to create even more stress in the sensitive lives of others. Inevitably, perhaps the human beings in charge of any group do go a little power-looped, to a degree. Possibly they forgot, in this case, what a trial it is for people to stand up in front of an audience, let alone read someone else's stuff just foisted upon them. A way to stop new readers getting involved too, I guess).

The audience who were drifting in by then, a weekly meeting to spy upon the minds and hearts of various writers, scribblers, list-maniacs, ravers, mumblers and lyric-fans at a pub named after a parched animal. It could be a better venue at any time, the place changes whenever the management at one bar, cafe or salon decides they've had enough, or the organisers find a new place they think is more suitable.  This pub does have lots of room, comfortable seating, and a sound system but the mic stand is broken, the drinks are far too expensive and there's hardly any parking. I believe the buses from our suburb no longer stop near there either.  The quality of guest poets has also been somewhat low lately, based on who is known personally and liked for their sociability perhaps, rather than choosing poets whose work is challenging, really original or simply stellar and who will truly draw attention from many people.

This woman, anyway, we call her Q?, was furious with the idea she could not read her own work, (she'd already broadcast the fact she was reading to many, who were arrving even as we spoke to see her). She told the MC, 'This is like a Tea Party or an Embroidery Club, it is supposed to be about POETRY.' Spun around when she marched off to the bar for a drinkule, one of those alko-holes which sometimes seem the only place to run to. Meanwhile, a set of sequinned older women who would've looked and sounded quite at home in Las Vegas, sound checked on stage, to sing covers of a well known 70s rock band in sparkling cabaret-style. Opening act. The usual singer-songwriter musicians, or more artful music performance at this poetry night mysteriously absent.
Q? told me later she found it curious, their choice of musicians lately for the venue, 'It's as if art has left the building. Mind you, the sit-down-be-still-and-shut-up-society do run a lot of things in this country. Perhaps they own shares in pile medicine laboratories? I suppose this could be their kind of erm, art, the smoothness of it, you know, the lack of anything provoking. People getting along and behaving themselves is more important than anything to get them going, thinking, questioning.' She looked doubtful. 'You know, there's countless odd things people do with music. But they had something like abuse set to tunes a few weeks ago.  Honestly, crass and tedious sadism some of it, sung. Grotesque and not in a Hieronymus Bosch way. I decided this horrible music was obviously for people who did not enjoy sex, who did not have a very good command of the English language and who enjoyed abuse, which is not my style at all. And now this overly-mannered, gussied up stuff. Polished sure, good singers definitely, but this is a poetry venue. Where's the organisers' insight and wit?  This work has zero wit. It's super-duper cabaret and belongs in that kind of place, not here.'
We sat there wondering, and had to agree there were a handful of older audience members who liked the overly long musical spot, (it really is a poetry venue, not a music venue so we hope this long musical intro., is shorter in future). A few younger people looked startled, then their amazement at the extraordinarily sequinned performers carried them through a short while of it. Many others like us appeared uninterested, irritated, or openly bored.
But, wonder of all wonders, the poet Q? was eventually permitted to read her own work on this poetry evening, during open mic and in the first section, so she did not have to get more and more weary waiting til later on, after working all day beforehand. She did so, just before the guest poet read a great deal of other people's writing which we thought strange too, (guest poets usually read their own verses), however, this, below, is what the woman, Q? read.  I'm so glad I have a copy. What do you think?

Ish mrael and the Yooesaye - the same thing in different places

religious hives

frightly different basic abuzzin'

without honey

nest eggs wasp-screech for corp., capital

to mind behind the bunnies of non-hippity hop

top top top people floating in charge

a bubble swell

thick walls of elastic messages

sumptuous clothes and cars

hum like sycophants

food selected from the furthest reaches of unpoisonous

where no chemical they make to pay for the dishes

has yet reached or beached nor teaches any hard lesson

only organic fantasticals while blister-packs are outlawed there

piled up instead elsewhere to trick seabirds

who feed fancy particles to their chicks

starved corpses a circle of feathers around plastic fragments

chain reactions translated into witty gold

told children wear adult skin in charge of countries

controllers inside their ears and fears

inhabit micro-chips and definer jewellery with whispers

film their meat puppets' every woken or sleepful

anonymous wanna-be artists

human being material

distanced from consequences

actors have pay docked remotely

the weary disappointment of slave labour

translated into fine art

children swapped for expensive shoes

asleep under the roads

out of sight a wrong day from penthouse deodorisers

or hot air balloon super-yacht strip the stars for birthdays

while trees burn into ghosts

and the air cooks adore and floors

dumbed by education cuts - rump not sirloin

numbed by luxury dumps

the finest designer drugs (tested on illegal aliens paid with credit)

alcohol (from limited rendition handblown or flysewn)

sex (performed by enhanced athletes

who rarely question beyond sheets and positions)

a test of humanity afar and dim

other galaxies also mighty shapes and darkness

divorced from shadow traces in their blown hearts

uncomfortable lost too much moola

married to Munie Gunns and Powah Flowers

the unidentical twins of ruin disguised as hybrid movie stars

a polyamorous affair

the man plan or woman wish in the middle

gradually turns into stone

an effigy

a monument to bend-spending and wreck flecks

a fine statue erected to them in any rhyme at time

guy ropes fine snapping

back

taking an eye or off a limb

the dangers of ego-cuckoo art starling

(fright much or flight tough)?

the few people who do know -

a combination pappy deal of over-done pleasings

and the tease of wish knowing then never easing

the results of greed-riven choicest

sociopaths and psychopaths and concrete paths to cliffs

almost everybody near those peeps too afraid

people in steeples with keep keep keep written all over

in invisible ink

the heat of a rioting crowd brings messages darker

those responsible inside wide

surrounded with watchers and clockers

who refuse to do much but agree sting

the way water mixes with dirt and acid and poison

hide real opinions

take this pretend and stake your fake it

but make it never happens does it?

hoping for the best like prisoners on death row

corporate kulcha needs a good long look at itself

triple mirror every view naked on a TV show

lock some semi-demi-people up for the public's safety

grateful the computer did not turn into an operetta while I wrote this

can hear the fizz of a fuse lit somewhere

writing in a bunker under a golf course

using an assumed name based on a video game

something like bad painting

or a rock band called Sainted Sluts

forget you ever read these absurd bird scratchings

unless necessary some time to confess you've burst

set the paper on fire

a spill to light your stray from the tunnel we're in

finding the sky blue again some flare

our tears and cries filling whirly to the brim

crims making us swim unless we're drowning

                                sounding

                                            pounding

                                             By the poet known as Question

May Hem and Nut Case from the I Guess I Just Don't Know exhibition 2011

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