How I Write Poetry

A little piece I did at a poetry slam...

Words crowd upon the page like wait staff mimes
in a scripted banquet scene from a lesser known film by Fellini.
They flail their arms and bend their waists and tilt their heads --
their thin, wan smiles overexpressed and held, ridiculously, a little too seriously.  Tensed, they thus stand, their lips pursed and pursing in bright red lipstick on their pale white faces.
They have come to work the banquet without adequate training, they were hired not for their competence but because they were the only ones able to find the address,
to make their way down the dark alley and into the kitchen’s bright light.

The words stand in a line, waiting to be summoned.  They hold their pose
and refill glasses as they come to half full.
They have had a difficult night.  They have been clumsy in their flailing, and
have spilled food everywhere.
They have thrown wine in the faces and plates in the laps of their unhappy guests.
They are mockingly apologetic in response to the alarmed and questioning looks they find on the faces of the startled revelers.
They trace, with a finger, a tear down the cheek.
They bend to wipe the lap of the bespectacled intellectual.
They notice the overturned meats, the rolling olives, that  have been spilled onto the tablecloth of the  hungry workmen and they point and hold their bellies and act as if they are laughing.

The earth goddess sits alone among the luminaries, hangers-on, and wanna-be’s who attend the banquet. She is aloof, yet somehow embracing. 
She sits with her legs crossed, the smooth tension in her firm muscle bouncing in the lengthening light, outlined by the moon, whose purpose it is to reflect upon her.
She tosses her chin in conversation, perhaps smokes, her face covered in a sweeping white scarf and her eyes hidden behind overlarge sunglasses.
Her face is thin and angular and intelligent and glows with the glow of experienced youth.
Her body is lithe beneath a shimmering gown.
She has the soul of a mother.
She has the heart of a whore.
She is beautiful.
The mimes find themselves at a loss for words.

The scene is luminous in its overlit production, so that even if the stage lights extinguished,
the stars would flood the scene with a reticent glow.
Occasionally there are nights when the stage lights themselves seem redundant, when  the stars align, and the moons and the planets align, and the mimes serve their purpose with dignity and poise.
But usually it is like Jupiter is on her period
and Pluto can’t decide whether he’s in or he’s out.

On these nights, the mimes act badly, and they spill food and wine in the faces and laps, and meats and olives on the table of the guests -- and they seem to be mocking, almost sincerely so.
On these nights, the intellectual leans over to the workmen and makes, in a conspiratorial tone of his own, some comment about the mimes, how they can’t seem to get out of their box, how they walk across a highwire without a net.
And on these nights the mimes stand silent.

It is a silence in which one could hear a fork drop.
They stand in the silence of their black coats and ties, and their white painted faces, and their lips dripping Titian red.  And listen to the intellectual -- his voice being the only thing that cuts through the gauzy stillness. 
He’s saying something like…  If these were Saturn’s children
-- sweeping his hand across the nighttime tableau in a way that made the workmen unsure whether he was talking about the mimes or the stars, or the moons and planets aligned behind them--
He’d eat them.