Last night was an open mic poetry night at the Lit­er­ary Café and over a dozen local poets showed up to do their thing. Many thanks should go to Steve Gold­berg and Nick Traenkner for orga­niz­ing it, and to Andy and Linda for host­ing. R.A. Wash­ing­ton read, as did Steve Smith and Nick and Steve of course. Also read­ing were C. Allen Rearick, Every­man of Col­or­forms, Eric Alle­man, Rebecca Cal­vetti, Kate Sopko, and Alexan­der Malina. If I missed any­body, I apol­o­gize. Hell, even I read a few. The crowd was pretty sup­port­ive of me and I know they liked at least two of the five poems I read. It was also very nice to see what other peo­ple are doing with words. A few peo­ple read longer poems, some­thing I find it almost impos­si­ble to write, and one poet even had sin­gle sen­tence thoughts that sort of blended together into a long one. If there is another one, I’m pretty sure I’ll do it again. Being in close quar­ters with poets makes me want to write more.

I gave the folks there the oppor­tu­nity to pick my last poem, since I split the other four between seri­ous stuff and children’s poems. Here are the poems I read:

• Break­ing Up is Hard To Do
• Dervish
• Haunted House [2^nd ver­sion]
• Smober the Sock Gob­lin
• Car­tog­ra­phy

And if you want to sift your way through all my poetry, includ­ing tons of shitty stuff. It’s all here. Also, you can watch me read Break­ing Up is Hard to Do on the Lit’s site, here.