After the one that sings, and after the one <br />that can make up poems of a kind right on the spot; <br />after a girl who didn't . . . walk very well, <br />took five minutes to get from her seat to the stage <br />then read one poem with hardly any words in it <br />and halted the whole way back in a staggering silence; <br />after the bald one's rhymes about this teeth; <br />a woman got up whose poems won't write down, <br />it's all in the way the voices in her come out. <br /> <br />We went to a medium once, and a woman locked <br />in a trance let a dead man come inside her and talk. <br />She held herself like . . . a woman being a man. <br />That's what it was at the open stage poetry reading, <br />and I left without talking, I hadn't come expecting it. <br />What could I have told her, I think it's a dead man? <br />It wasn't something I wanted to get that close to. <br />I could never do it myself, let a dead man come in- <br />or would it be, into me, a dead woman that would come?<br /><br />Eric Torgersen<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/open-stage-poetry-reading/
