Reading at Medium 43

Just came from a poetry meeting which always leaves me in a good mood, both because of the multiple breaks to partake in refreshments of the herbal variety, and because of the poetry and general good vibes, and tonight was no exception.
It was our first indoor reading of the season, because it’s really too cool to sit outside for hours and also too dark, even the last reading we had everybody was using their mobile phones for illumination when they read their poems and it was kind of an eerie look, so it was nice to be in a warm, cozy place, not really a pub, more like a coffee shop that also sells beer, and there are a variety of comfy chairs and sofas scattered around nothing matching anything else, and they made a very nice raspberry lemonade, which I almost forgot to pay for, they stopped me at the door. That happens sometimes.
My poem, my long masterpiece that’s been festering in my mind for months and got completed this afternoon, received only polite applause, and people liked the selection of short poems I read in the second round much better. It’s like that old Donald O’Connor movie where they sang “You can study Shakespeare and be quite the elite, but slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh.”
It’s all good though. It’s written, and that’s a big load off (as Gertrude Stein once said when asked why she liked writing so much: “I don’t like writing. I like having written.”), and I, personally, am convinced it’s good and it will be in my next book, and probably one of the better poems in it.