I’m at a gathering in a nearby beach town which deems itself to be neighborly and folksy and traditional. Somehow I find myself in need of a shower and a change of clothes, with an eye for making use of a nearby beach house to accomplish this. However, I find myself naked on the street and struggling to cover myself with a towel. I look up to a deck of a restaurant fully populated with diners, and I wonder if any of them have noticed my display.

There is a woman with me, a local who is going to escort me into a performance space. When we arrive, the room is quite full of folks who seem to be finishing their dinners and have moved into the dessert course. Along with their ice cream and coffee, poetry is to be performed, and I am the first poet.

I am not really prepared. I do not have my poems together. I’m not mentally ready. But all the basic impulses are in gear to carry on anyway.

I share some of my latest work. It is profoundly convoluted, expressing passionate energies concerning the collapse of various structures of civilization as we have known it. This is not going over very well, but I forge ahead, aware that the audience is not connecting. Indeed, I am aware that various people have gotten up and left, and that there is a general trend now, a wave of departures. But I stick with my ill-prepared poetry until I am done, then look up to see that a small remnant of the original audience remains. Undaunted, I go further still, now with some filler material, and when I look up again, I notice that a second wave of audience is arriving and filling the seats. “I see we have a second seating! Ready for a second set…”

I am aware of a fresh readiness, a fresh start, but this time I am even more aware of the sketchiness of my poems—indeed, the sketchiness of all my poetry, and of my pretensions of ever having been a poet. But I keep going, using all the various performance devices that I know well. However, it becomes more and more difficult to find my place. Looking at the pages before me, they turn into an intricate, overwrought, three-dimensional puzzle—a matrix, like a child’s toy, like a verbal tinker-toy structure that less and less resembles poetry at all. I can pick out a word here and there, and when I do, I present it with enthusiasm. But I am aware that I really have nothing. I have nothing at all to present to the people. I am much aware that there is zero connection. I can sense disappointment, frustration, dismissal, and shades of anger. I know there is not a single soul in the space who is relating to what I’m offering, or even could relate. I have no real capability of authentic connection. I have no real poetry.

Nonetheless I plow on to make a finish. I keep up the persona and wrap things up as if nothing were amiss. Again, the crowd has thinned out quite a bit because of the nothingness I have offered. I am aware that I did a reasonable job of suggesting that the next poet up may actually have something to offer.

I walk off and sit on a bench at the side of the room. There are a couple of young guys there who obviously have paid no attention to my debacle and are only interested in their own thing. I am aware that it is completely pointless for me to place myself in such a situation as I have just encountered ever again, being the non-poet, the non-being poet.