Painful

The poetry open mic reading at Kieran’s pub felt like watching a bike slide across the ice and the rider, bloody and mangled, begin to struggle to their feet only to have an SUV pulverize them.  The first poem started out travelling smoothly, but it went too far, drove a little too fast and subsequently crashed in the middle of its track across the road.  The concept of the first poem intrigued me, taking Poe’s The Raven but instead creating a humorous, modern, and erotic poem.  The rhythm and meter followed that of Poe’s work, forming an interestingly patterned and flowing poem.  However, I found the poem took its sexual theme to an extreme, perhaps for shock value or because the author couldn’t think of any other rhymes.  This caused it to become uncomfortable, not only for me, who feels awkward easily, but for most of the people in that room.  The bike had hit an icy patch, but it still had an opportunity to save itself before it wiped out.  The next poem does not merit classification as such.  A man stood before a regretfully open mic and ranted.  Unfortunately, open mics do not have rules in place for the revoking of poetry rights, something new I learned that night.  If terrible, distressingly illiterate writers wish to speak for five, or tragically, ten minutes, they cannot be stopped.  The bike had slipped into a tangled mess that nobody wants to witness, but the watcher cannot avert their eyes.  The night ended with a long prose poem that bordered significantly on the side of story.  The poem captured my attention with hopeful potential.  I believed for a moment this bike could still drive away, and took the time to appreciate the cozy, book filled room, the dark wood implying a severity and competency that none of the poems so far had encompassed.  I sipped on the lemonade I ordered because the reading took place in a bar.  My personal experience, sitting on a cushioned bench, enjoying my lemonade with crunchable and properly bit sized ice, found no issue, but the discomfort came from sympathetic embarrassment.  Witnessing a room full of one speaker, crashing in slow motion, while the rest of the onlookers cringe in their shared distress did not live up to my idea of a quiet, sincere and intellectual poetry evening as envisioned when I entered the library-esque back room of this polite little pub.  Suffice to say, the last story-poem suddenly turned cliché and difficult to follow, as the SUV of poetry standards leered above the floundering reading and drove straight over it, similar to the fate of the endearing puppy in the final poem.