Have people over for a poetry reading and create exquisite corpses

LOCATION: God's great green earth TIME: When inspiration strikes EQUIPMENT: Musical words, wine, cheese, whiskey to be drunk from the bottle

Poetry!!! I spent an hour getting everything in the living room perfect - books strewn around, ready for tea, inspiring statements taped to wall, pillows, candles, incense, snacks, wine, music! All my friends always want to do things like go to bars and clubs and out to movies and stuff like that. Me, to be perfectly honest, I'd be just as happy sitting at home reading Charles Simic out loud in my living room. And it's so much more fun having a live audience than my stuffed lamb, Jamin.

Among other activities: the game "Exquisite Corpses." You pass around a piece of paper with a collaborative poem. Each person writes a line, and each person folds over the piece of paper so that the next person can only see one previous line. We created two:

#1
There are so many things I've forgotten from my childhood
But who cares, I've been drinking
Life is movement, let's drink that!
Swirling, like an ether-drunk ballerina
who leaps and falls to my surprise then opens our eyes and shuts our souls
with monumental enterprise, like a stripper on a pole
....a totem pole, spiraling up into the night sky
with fireflies swirling around and round up high
I taste a caffeine midnight, and tell a pretty lie.


#2
Peacocks tilt their heads, purple green feathered friends
But we're a flock of different feather and dare not ever bend
as an arrow, reaching toward its hungry goal
scratching a rent in the sky's starry bowl
When I can only afford a basement studio in the hood
and leave my duct tape & newspaper slippers,
staples, clippers, and pocket protectors,
by our design are our connectors, and we give them all too much place
allowing for a single plant a vast cornfield, a single chair; an empty room.
Let people look for freedom; let them find it; I just hope they know what to do with it!
Or if they don't, let's make a cup of tea, and find a comfy place to sit.
And bury me, in an apple orchard, so I may kiss your lips again
and breathe the ciphers in the cyanide seeds
buried in the drip juicy fruit of late ripe winter.