Getting it off my chest

I performed this the other night.

The problem with writing performance poetry at the moment

is that at the moment I don’t give a fuck. Not about wars, the Tories, making people laugh, the homeless, the reckless, the feckless or the royal family. I have no interest in scoring small points off big targets in order to gain favour with a group of people who sit there in front of me expecting to be entertained with a quietly smug faith in their own alternativeness playing – if playing is not too strong a word – over their bland faces. There will be no revolution and anyone who claims to be leading one is patently lying. I have no desire to associate myself with self-promoting, self-aggrandising, one-trick-pony, I-am-the-resurrection-and-the-light-and-get-this-I’m-local persistently-local Eminem wannabes who maintain that poetry is still due to be, despite all evidence to the contrary over the last few centuries or so, ‘the new rock’n’roll’, and who only maintain this because their own observations are neither common enough to work as comedy or deep enough to be worth reading on the page. I have no wish to assume a faux-spiritual take on the universe, at the forefront of which would be some mantra/mission statement involving the words ‘peace’, love’, ‘light’ or – god forgive us all – ‘oneness’, the appreciation of which requires the same slack-jawed, wide-eyed, chin stroking reverence and lack of critical awareness found in lab monkeys the world over, and which contains the kind of jackdawed together credo of shite new age platitudes that serves only to put the user or listener deeply within the ‘look at me I am your brother/sister and I am better than you, albeit in a passive-aggressive way’ category and which should in itself be reason enough to take said person outside for a kicking, just to see how far the theory is put into practice, and which, furthermore, as any jury in the country will tell you, makes the phrase ‘gassed like badgers’ entirely justifiable. And poets who write poetry about their poetry and their writing of said poetry not to mention problems with writing it need to get over themselves. There are no exceptions. This does not make everything else allright. Enough said.

It felt good.

Compelled. Terminator. Alley.

I don’t think I’m a compulsive blogger. It’s just not in me. I am a compulsive reader though. And I’ve developed a web rut, a routine of sites to check in a very un-interactive way. It’s a kind of security I think, like walking the same way to work. It’s not always healthy to have such a routine, I know. So I always know what the Guardian football page is saying. Ask me every ten minutes or so when I’m online if it’s changed and I’ll probably be able to tell you. Maybe a bit of a blog will help to blow away the cobwebs.

I was talking to somebody yesterday about broadband connections and he was telling me that Sky are looking at satellite connections. Six years until we’re looking for John Connor then. Bagsy the big gun.

I’m also stopping the running of the open mic gig at the Alley Cafe in Nottingham. The last event is on the 21st of this month. Five years and out indeed. It feels like the right thing to do. Perhaps I can concentrate a little more on my own stuff rather than hosting other people’s. Lots of regulars have asked me why I’m stopping. I’ve said it’s someone else’s turn now. Some people look a bit blank at that point. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great fun – mostly – I’m just tired of being asked to host stuff and having conversations where it feels like someone’s talking to the gig. I seem to have partly lost the ability to distinguish when this is happening. Perhaps I’ll go to someone else’s poetry night now. After a break, natch.