POETRY FINAL

It sounds like the kind of thing that only happens in a game of Monopoly, but honestly, I won second prize in a poetry competition.

There was no real prize, as such - just a round of hearty applause. And even the guy who won went home with a mug, such is the nature of these amateur things.

He was really good actually. He did some serious spoken-word stuff about being a teenager, about waking up next to someone, and about a defibrillator outside a funeral home and why it might have been there. Plus he did it all from absolute memory. It was almost like rapping. I wish I could be that cool.

Instead I got up and read poems about oversized vegetables and drinking a cup of tea at a bus stop. I’ve no idea what Eminem at the back there might have made of my silliness, but people laughed, so that’s probably a win.

I’ve really enjoyed the experience of the poetry slam. It started online in the first lockdown, when I nervously logged into a zoom. It carried on in person when I finally went to a live one last month. This ‘final’ felt like the end of a particular story arc, in which I’d made a few new friends.

There were some funny moments too. At one point, three unusual people and a dog bustled in and started making a fuss. The room was polite enough to let them in. They shuffled in and sat by me, crowded around my little wooden table. Well, actually the dog didn’t; the dog was lovely. She just crept under the piano stool and curled up.

I smiled at one of the ladies from behind my mask. She beamed back from under her wispy white hair and beret. The guy, dressed like an aged roadworker from the 70s, flopped into the chair with his back to me, and rested one squeaky Doc Marten on top of the other. It wasn’t long before he was standing up and commanding the room with his request to say something. He could not say just something though - but rather lots of things that weren’t connected with anything really at all. I felt a surge of compassion for him; clearly not everything was connected properly.

The third of the trio was a Caribbean lady who seemed to be all mask and hair. She had twinkly eyes and a high-vis jacket. She mumbled through, gently patting the arm of the old lady, and Billy Bragg's shoulder. The dog, I assumed was with her, though I couldn’t really tell as the animal had found the piano long before they’d found their seats.

He tried to get get up to read a poem again but got lost in his own thoughts and had to sit down.

In the end of course, they left. I think the host might have been slightly relieved. I remember once he had to deal with being zoom-bombed by randomers, and he seemed quite flustered. I remember thinking that growing up in church, and being a youth-worker had given me my fair share of awkward meetings and how to deal with them, though I would still have struggled. It makes me laugh now to think of all the preachers who had to stop mid-sentence to decide whether they would entertain a heckle from the local alcoholic. You know, in a way, I’m kind of sad that that doesn’t seem to happen any more.

Anyway. The poetry slammers, in their city-centre, flakey old pub, quickly returned to the bonhomie of a friendly poetry competition. Blue flashing lights sped by past the frosted windows, horns beeped from somewhere, the tea lights flickered coldly on the tables and the poets spilled their hearts out.

A little while later, I turned to the guy next to me, just beyond the chair where the Caribbean lady had been sitting. I’d been wanting to complement his brown shoes and bright blue laces, but something more pressing had just occurred to me.

“Have they gone?” I asked him. He nodded and told me that he thought so.

“Only…” I said, “They seem to have left their dog behind.”

Indeed, curled up under the piano stool, breathing softly on the hard wooden floor, the small Alsatian hadn’t seemed to notice her trio of unusual shepherds had left her there. The guy peered round me, and laughed into his sleeve.

“I suppose you could write a funny poem about this!” he said, chuckling.

Young Eminem at the back there, looked over sullenly from beneath his square American baseball cap. I smiled back.

Maybe I could, I thought.