RDRR is tomorrow night!

Though technically seeing as it is after midnight, RDRR is tonight. Tonight we will be featuring Molle Dorst and Amanda Hiebert, two amazing spoken-word artists. Generally at Rochdale Rhymes and Readings we only have one spoken-word artist and a page poet. But I'd already booked Amanda and decided I really wanted Molle to have a spot before she went back to Kingston to finish her grad school work and seeing as RDRR is taking a break until September, now was the time. So if anyone does read this blog and is into spoken word, performance poetry or "slam," RDRR goes down July 20, 8 p.m. at the Regal Beagle, 335 Bloor St. W. That's in the old Rochdale College building beside the Bata Shoe Museum, by St. George subway station. There's an open mic and admission is whatever you throw into my fedora. Hosted by yours truly, Mike Lipsius. And if anyone who reads this was at the Toronto Poetry Slam on Friday, please tell me who won. I had to leave part way through the second round.

4 Poems, if You Call it Poetry

These are four poems I've written in the last week. One was about going to an NHL hockey game, sitting in the rich people's seats and watching a man and his date for the night. One is an attempt at writing erotic love poetry. One is about overhearing a conversation with a trio of people outside a pub. One was written while very bored at work on an incredibly slow day, trying to just relax and even meditate and being unable to due to distractions. Enjoy.

Mike


The Hockey Game
And she was holding his hand.
I’ll never know if it was about love or money,
or just a love of money.
And maybe she had all the money
and had a thing for older men.
We sat behind them, Mel,
watching a horrible hockey team play masterfully
in $180 seats given away as easily as a puck from McCabe.
Toskala was great.
Tlusty was grand.
Antropov was fantastic.
For a period of time,
the second period to be exact,
we were fixated on two people in the rich people’s seats.
You whispered,
“Do you want a trophy wife when you’re older?”
People so rich they only hung around for the middle of the game.
Or maybe a bartender knows they never left.
They took the subway home, after all.
Guess who sat beside them?
Fighting a smile was never so hard.
The Leafs will only polish golf clubs this year,
but someone in front of me, has a trophy.

Chocolate
I do want to feel you. I do want my toes to run up and down your legs. I want to feel your skin under bedsheets after midnight and at the rise of sunlight.

Yet, the reality is, I’m greedy. I want more. I want more like a cocaine addict wants more. But I seek something fulfilling. I want you to playfully pull my sweater and pants up and my hat down over my eyes, blinding me to everything but your world. I long for the one who seeks joy proudly prancing around naked, unashamed of all the blemishes we have and never talk about, only trying to let them heal and never covering them up.

I long for something as sensual, beautiful and erotic as us feeding dark chocolate to one another, naked between the sheets in the pitch black of night.


The Spitter
Two lovers and a third wheel
stepped out for a smoke.
The third wheel is a spitter.
"Stop spitting! That's gross!"
Yells the woman.
Her lover kisses her and says,
"Spitting's not gross, swallowing is gross."
The woman yells,
"I know, but he's just spitting saliva!"
The stranger you're ignoring now knows something about you.

Unable
With eyes closed,
I have no idea what awaits me.
I have no idea if an ear-rattling alarm
will abort my trance.
I know I have yet to reach it.
An annoying external voice
holds my head open,
stopping my mind from entering the surreal.
I want to hear, "fucking right, fucking right, fucking right,"
no more.
A wedge between my ears will not allow me to relax.
I cannot enter a dream state.
My meditation is going nowhere,
pre-empted by the sounds
of "Fucking eh, fucking right, what the fuck's that about?"

March 8

A blizzard blasts my eyelids.
I stumble through mountainous snowdrifts
and almost leave a print of my face in one.
"Suck it up," one man tells me.
"This is summer in Sudbury."
I'm now warm in the pub
where they hand out
mint-flavoured lifesavers with meals.
Where the days counting to St. Patrick's Day
change from nine to eight two hours early.
Where a lousy pub band plays music.


I know I am sick, morbid and selfish, when I tell you,
dying tonight wouldn't be so bad
if I had to die young.
I'm in the 27s, though I ain't so famous.
Deathclock once said I'd die on a March 8.
There's a blizzard in the window.
I'm alone on the other side.
The man beside me was here for two pints and leaving.
He's on his fifth and close to gone.
Dying on a Saturday when the world is dead.
I love life and seek to find what tomorrow feeds me.
Yet the rush of death is a once in a lifetime experience.