Weird Open Mic Poetry
“It Was Technically a Poem. Emotionally, It Was a Cry for Citrus-Based Help.”
The backroom of Moonbean Café went silent Wednesday night as local poet Ashby Grove took the mic wearing a burlap scarf and announced: “Tonight’s offering is untitled. As all things broken should be.”
What followed was a 12-minute piece involving metaphors like “avocados of anguish,” “the weeping routers of suburbia,” and a guttural shriek that represented “the silence between passwords.”
Audience members were unsure whether to clap or reboot their routers. One man fainted. Another asked if this counted as performance tax fraud.
Regulars described the poem as “Kafka meets kitchen rot” and “what it might sound like if fruit had emotional damage.”
Ashby ended the set by releasing a single balloon labeled “404” and declaring, “I no longer connect.”
The café is now instituting a limit on metaphor density and forbidding the use of overripe produce as props.
Ashby, however, has booked three more readings at farmers markets and launched a blog: *Bitrate Blues & Bruised Fruit.*
Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.
