Ad Astra January

Hadn’t had a poetry reading for about 2 months, as the last one was in November, and I’d accumulated quite a body of work..  Well, not that lengthy, most of the poems were 8 lines or less, but  a few of them were good enough, I think.
I was surprised that there was a huge crowd when I got there, barely any place to sit, I was perched on the windowsill.  But, it hadn’t started yet, so a couple of us went out to smoke a joint, and met a couple more outside already engaged in that process, which is a tradition of Prague poetry  readings that I highly approve of.
So, I didn’t miss anything.  In the first half, our resident Icelandic poet performed a sort of two act play, a romantic dialogue, for which he employed a volunteer from the audience and it was kind of brilliant because she rose to the occasion and it was a very emotive reading on both sides.  There was a Russian guy  I’ve never seen there before and he read a rhyming epic about the life of a monk in the middle ages who looked through a telescope  and learned about the universe and then  he went to the pope and said ‘Why does the Earth turn around the sun?”  and they accused him of heresy and he said, but I know it’s true, and they said destroy the telescope and never speak of  this again, so he did and then, eventually, he died, at least that’s what I understood.  I kind of  got lost, but it was interesting.
My stuff went over O.K.  My satirical ditty about the current American president got laughs at all the right places, mostly because I  used the  word ‘dumbfuck’ a whole lot.  I think everybody  liked  that.