Performing A Poem

The old poetry malarkey is going quite well at the moment. We recently had the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival here in Belfast, with many bohemian events occurring in the space of two weeks. I was fortunate enough to meet many amazing and beautiful people during this time. My mate Brian, along with help from the New Belfast Community Arts Initiative, held the prestigious Poetry Cup competition upstairs in White’s Tavern. The idea of this night was than performance poets would compete against the clock to get up on stage and perform one poem to the best of their abilities. The clock was set on a backdrop behind the poet, a la Countdown style, counting down sixty seconds for each person to complete their piece. The audience reaction to each piece was measured by a decibel-o-meter, and the six people who received the loudest cheers went through to the final. Each of the six would get the chance to deliver their poem again, and the crowd reaction measured again.
There were twenty-six poets overall completing, and yours truly was picked to go onstage about two-thirds of the way through the night. At this point, I was still stone cold sober, and as usual, nervous as hell. You would think that after five gigs of doing this stuff I would be use to stage fright by now… Anyway, after introductions were made, I let rip with my poem. The piece I used wasn’t exactly Keatsian or grandiose in style or diction, but I knew I could give it a strong delivery, with gusto and aplomb! The crowd cheered, and I sat down to anxiously await the result.
A few pints down the line, and the successful poets who made it up to the final were announced one by one. I’m in there! Okay, so I didn’t think my performance was that great the first time round, but now I have a chance at redemption! Bang, I’m on stage, and I’m riled up for this… go! It’s a good, strong reading, and I’m happy with my lot, but I don’t know if I’ve done enough to win the whole thing. More anxious waiting….
Soon, the winners are announced. In third, with 106 decibels, is… the poet Chelley! Hoorah, my friend Chelley is in the top three. Brilliant! In second, with 108 decibels, is… Colin Dardis! Wow! I’m runner-up! This is cool! This is stupendous actually! I’m so chuffed! The eventual winner was a guy called Brendan, who read a poem out about how much he hates his boss. Well, we can all sympathize with him on that one. He won with a reaction of 110 decibels- only two decibels above me- so close! Maybe if I hadn’t cheered for him myself, I might have won? Haha, just kidding!
That was three weeks ago. I’ve done a few poetry readings since, but I’ve been dying with a killer throat infection, so I haven’t been able to reach my usual standard. And still that elusive publishing deal evades me… maybe Nick Laird could give me a few pointers...

(Not) Having a Life Plan

Some friends have been talking about the importance of having a life plan. Feck, no chance of that occurring for my good self. To start off with, I am in no way that organised to ever look at my life and say, here’s where I want to be in five years time. I just can’t believe that, given the chance, people would choose to live their lives out in such a fashion. Myself, I thrive on chaos; I run on empty and I’ll be damned if I haven’t become quite good at it. Of course, some would probably say that that’s the problem.
You see, people can usually be split into two groups. The yes and the no parties. The do and the don’t camps. The East and West of the Bann. There are those who charge with all limbs thrashing into any situation and show passion, forthrightness and impatience. And then there are folk who hold back, rationalising every possible path and contiguency, until they have gone through their form of logic to reach a conclusion. Only then, do they strike, and that’s only if they prosess the courage to. I have proven to be a dangerous combination of the two factions: I can easily run through the whys and why-nots, and weigh us the strengths and weakenesses of most dilemmas. I can give you the pros and cons, weigh them up in front of you, but reaching a sensible decisions is just alittle beyond my capabilities. So then I just decide to heave-ho, feck everything to the wind, and charge in regardless anyway. In my life, there are few steps back. All in all, it makes for a pretty intriguing, if somewhat shambolic, existence.
My new year’s resolutions for the past three years have been the following:

2003: Learn how to smoke properly.
2004: Drink more gin (or another suitable spirit of choice).
2005: Have a threesome.

I quickly scrapped the third one after amusing myself with the idea and shocking others when I told them about it. The whole purpose of these non-resolutions where to attack the empty promises people make to themselves every year. I don’t like New Year’s at all. It teaches people to look at and examine their lives year by year, whereas I think we should be dong that on a day by day basis. What’s the point of looking ahead if you have no idea how to decipher what’s happening around you right at this moment? How on earth are you going to forge ahead wrapped in mystery and only relying on hindsight to guide you forward? I am not spurred on by regret or sorrow. I am only moving ahead because I assuredly know that I can get better. I am not reached the pinnacle of my talents, and I refuse to believe that where I am now is my apex, my personal plateau.
So after taking up smoking, and developing a taste for whiskey (gin was too sour, rum too able to screw me up big style), I found myself without a resolution for 2005. I spoke to a few people about whether I should continue my prescribed trail of self-destruction. Everyone seems keen for me to drive myself to an early grave. However, when you reach twenty-five, you wonder how long you can get away with being an adolescent.
“Do you think twenty-five years is an old age?”
“Yes, it is,” I responded to Clare over dinner at a team night out, “it is if you haven’t done anything with your life yet.”
Jason, my team manager, was sitting to my left.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Growing my hair back

Oh crap. Why oh why can I not write these dang blog entries on time?

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent most of the last two weeks shifting awkwardly, but delightfully, between states of drunkenness and the-morning-after-lurching-for-sobriety-and-missing. I shouldn’t even be drinking at all, due to a nasty duodenal ulcer which seems to kick up a stink after a few whiskies. But hey, if you ever see me in the bar and for some unexplained reason, you do feel compelled to buy me a drink, I’ll be having a Jack and Coke. Cheers!

Last night I dreamt I had long hair again. The style was a kind of indie-rock guy crop, thick and bushy, but not overly wild. It had bounce- I can’t ever remember my hair having bounce. The hair swirled around my cranium when I strode down the street, denying any trace of male-pattern baldness and proclaiming to the world, “oh yes, I know I look good and no amount of follicle-reducing stress or age is going to stop me!” My head was once more enriched by a dense haven of locks and strands, swaying over my eyes and tucking behind my ears. I could feel my hand run through this mane while I giggled with delight, with wonderment that I had been blessed with such a presence, that somehow I had managed to escape being bald, and forever cold without the aid of some form of hat. I must have been laughing in my sleep, it felt that good!
And then I woke up. For a moment, I thought the hair had remained, that magically my scalp had tapped into some previously unknown protein source in my body and sprouted forth a dark but glowing hairstyle suitably for a beatnik poet or a disillusioned slacker. But no, alas, there was no gain, no additional spurts of growth, no long, glowing lock riding down my face and across my pillow. There was just me and my receding hair-line, same as there is every morning, same as there will be every morning.
Maybe I wouldn’t have dreamt about this if a friend hadn’t encouraged me to grow my hair back recently. For about eight or nine months, I had been shaving my head to a grade two cut, and I have to admit, coupled with some creative facial hair, it didn’t look that bad. I was worried beforehand that a completely shorn bonce would give me a slightly thuggish demeanour, a typical rough-lad look that would be quite ill-placed above my own features. The first time I shaved my head (and perhaps it was a mistake to undertake this task myself and not go to a professional) it took me over half an hour to fashion some kind of evenness around the dome of my head, and even then I managed to leave a wedge of hair stretching around the back of my head, between the ears, which was a few grades longer than the rest. Thank God for beanie hats. I chickened out of the severe cut, and went for a less drastic grade six, if I recall correctly.
I should state that for the previous few years, I had sported an unruly mane, which once over a certain length, flipped and curled in every direction away from my face. There was no styling product on the market below the consistency of wood glue which could tame this mangled beast. And yet, here I am, missing my long hair and cursing the fact that nowadays, my hair’s growth rate is slower than the economic growth of a developing country.