KHWEST - open mic night

Small, shirt tucked tightly into pants, trim figure with arms spread wide. His hands enveloped me as he kissed my forehead. “Mma,” he beamed, stretching his words like hot putty, “Mma, THIS is the Republic of Botswana.” His cheeks swelled and shifted up his face, the sun transplanted onto a drunk man’s pate. “Mma, you are always welcome here.”

I’m jittering with the rush of performance, the sound of the crowd, the wrinkle in time that somehow, in one evening closed the gap between there and here and that night and this night and fused the humanity that we try to separate into categories of race and nation, gender and religious persuasion, first and third, up and down.

I was shaking with the same adrenaline, feet tapping to the same urge of expression, the spark that opens mouths and moves tongues and spins threads of hope and doubt. There were MC’s and poetry, crude jokes and colloquy, things as they are and could and ought to be.

For just these hours I was anywhere, but most especially here. More firmly planted in this dry soil than ever before, dropping spores, sinking roots into the café floor. What I read was nothing much, nothing touched, just some jotted notes of self-expression. But it felt so good to present myself, to hear my name escape the speakers and fall on new ears, to push back fears, and to rip through a few lines of past time – slowly inching forward into the Now.

He spoke of a father’s neglect, She, of man’s disrespect: “Don’t FUCK with me.” A man calling himself DJ clown told us that he learned from cockroaches to stay in the kitchen and out of the bedroom. The comparison between Mugabe’s mustache and Adolph’s famous face drew gasps from the lungs around me, and when the young man with the striped shirt spoke of his girlfriend dying from AIDS, his positive test results, his last time on stage, we could only watch wide-eyed, wide-eared, with wide-fears. They were more than words and more than spoken and however honed the speaker’s skills in chiseling verse, it was expression in the raw.

I am so grateful for this night that it’s catching in my throat, and no matter the embarrassing intensity of a rhetorical lisp, I can’t help but breathe this wisp: what’s life without poetry?