The Opening Rapper

Is alright Spits a fine game nothing too hot but has flashes A man unpaused from the usual stop & go flow But not spinning quite at velocities necessary to escape orbit completely He stutters stepping jerky tendons awkward bones forget the joints cross stage, hesitating to uncork the greatness Still swigs, sure, but we want the bottle whole drenching our eardrums And the crowd retreats to the bar instead; his dainty sips of kvasir's blood won't hold our attention much compared to true mead Spoken gold pales before the liquid variety And post libation stands around half bobbing an inattentive crowd like bored Unsatisfied and self perpetuating the snideness Rather tune the tunes out then fall into rhythm with what really vibrates It's unfortunate, this quiet form of social violence Ostracize to block the poor poet out so that He sings songs for no one, it sounds like, the silence Half of us without concert partners, just the screens before us Even we'd rather be elsewhere, it seems Shit's the rudeness of humans unenthused by an inadequate peer, turning their energy off And i feel bad kinda swiping in turn on my phone Writing this all down With furious pecks at the screen Blaze white square in my face and I'm plumb in the front row starting straight down into the matrix And I'm not the only one who's full of it While art is unfolding in front of us Ignorant of it, willfully, in favor of what might be Can we believe if it's not super personalized anymore? Does technology obviate empathy? As I'm wondering this he announces his last song And you can just barely feel if you concentrate hard enough a ripple of relief sigh through the crowd, left to right In a wave of mutilation echoed by the shame across the first act's now forlorn face Just again it flits away as he grows no doubt in control of his wizarding abilities by the moment On the stage the once and future poet In master rhetoric advancing baby steps forward into the fiery hailstorm of an audience's glaring faces Or worse the toxic lack thereof As again the screens dominate every attention span He faces facts and fakes a tact tween gritted bitter teeth a primate smile back at the masses It's been great to get to play here, y'all Super glad I got the chance Yo, PD is the best ni**a, hands down It's a fucking honor to be chosen to open for him Yippee 2016 motherfuckers And the crickets respond to his outburst in effective and maliciously intended silence It storms the stage and shakes him violently Once twice three times Not what it ought to be, the relation tween poet and the entertained He knows this So do we But our fucks are not here to be given to him And our prerogative therefore is to withhold our love as such The silent majority chirps with quiet beeps Groupthink of the unenthused blows fuses in the one removed We v him Not rude–this is normalized ostracism He comes to us with feelings And with cold shoulders we respond to him Blood flow to our digits as for finger food we ignore the smörgåsbord before our souls on full display We knew this fucker wouldn't be the central key to our delight tonight so why invest more than the mite of passion we keep around to deal with happenstance in some dumb schmuck in low cut jeans and scrawny arms and mostly dumb trite clichéd things erupting from his mouth You've run your course here, ya hear yung grasshopper? now we done, therefore you should remove yerself presently He can feel this new enmity erupt resoundingly as they discover that he's the last person standing between their fucking eyeballs and PD THEIR ECSTASY EXPECTANTLY RIDES OVER ALL CURRENT ENERGY OUTPUTS HE IS IN BRIEF KAPUT RE: ATTENTION SPAN AVAILABLE TOWARDS HIS STAGE BEING EVERYTHING HE SAYS LOSES MEANING THEY DON'T CARE THEY DON'T CARE SO WHY SHOULD I He then realizes in his mind this counterfactual finding I can perceive the change coming over his face Physiognomy reifies indifference thru the new glint in his eyeballs Steelier cheekbones as he sets his face forward toward the crowd I'm not sure if they see it, the new man who's turned out for the last song Without a shit to spare and certainly now no longer here to share his vowel movements –thought out or not– with the ones that don't care and wouldn't deign to pretend anyway Seizing center stage tight grip on mike he stands tall and many shadowed in the omnipresent spotlights And uttered thusly these plosive twelve stanzas: My girlfriend left me ten days prior to this concert Called me from the airport She was supposed to fly from hometown out for this night, my big debut beneath the big time lights Four months apart we've spent and this the grand reunion, it was supposed to be Then when I saw her caller ID I knew the worst was to be shared No news is good news, when plans are prior made and in place Data disruptive of the flow of what to be was Dread rankled my vagus as I picked and said what's up, babe She told me no more need for pet names Time to face facts and call spades spades It's not working, this long distance relationship In fact quite the opposite: our connection impending was about to get broke I can't come to your concert, she said She was instead headed elsewhere, she said I asked where She said that that's not a fair question I didn't know what else to ask, I guess She took my silence as kind of acquiescence to my rejection Rather than confusion And with the quiet apparent she took opportunity to bury alive my hopes and dreams of reconnecting Hammered home the final coffin nail of a full time unavailable line tween two minds The dial tone honed staticky by brazen knives, her power tool voice's silence on the other side of my phone destroying my prior kind thoughts Not that I worried that much about facing the world alone but now I know why I would've On that last part his voice cracks; the mic feeds it back; the noisy loop of loopy human juke box falters (too loud, too sharp, too much exhaustion for this party); and as the sonic sparks drift off on echoes the crowd responds to his outburst uncomfortable by shuffling their feet, left leg scuffing the sole ever slightly of the soul to their right Awkward dance that shakes the phones' entrancement, up the audience collective glances to see man speaking words unexpected, stacking not fat cats cash no more verbally and instead describing openly the things that hurt him It is harder to ignore the noise of pain than anxious swagger Bluster dust devils swirl less now than straight up hailstorm maelstroms, fucking ice gobs in orbs falling hard, leaving paint marks in knocked off spots on the houses No one brought adequate survival wares to wear to provide proper protection for this weather Sad slash mad rap no marketable genre for the sheer fact of how spots of spitfire trauma hit, true caterwauling phonons leave marks burnt and frozen on your corpus callosum and nobody wants to hear that, feel that, deal with another tragedy such that gelid flames pock stress marks in the brain part where you cross thoughts from one hemisphere to another The middle of your black box no place for the overmuch experiences of an other The man goes on, piling onward and inward plowing into dearer parts of the hearers' brains: And I realize the fear derives from an outré kind of meaning making To me, this chick was the fucking world to me My high school girl by whom I defined a large part of my identity Thirty six months on since we first sat adjacent in third period lunch, two awkward juniors munching across the table, accidentally chewing in time together She complimented my sweater, which I promptly spilled sauce on, which she laughed at: it was love at first bite Lunch turned to dinner, dinner turned into late nights Same college, just down the road from our long time homes around a lakeside bend Easy going ness abounded by the loch, we'd each go to class and circle back to each other Simply lost in love's loop Had other friends and other social groups but she This girl Was how I'd define myself The metric by which I could check in with a being outside my own frame of reference to verify what I was Formative shit I grew dependent on her very existence And I thought that she reciprocated That we both'd bought in to a dual boot type living scheme She and me a we Y'all see what I'm saying? Y'all feel me? Not even crickets over the crackle of his last-shouted line ringing thru the sound system Everyone in earshot hears it, flinches, but no one's really listening He sees the indifference continues and doubles down nevertheless on it, his path toward uncertain accomplishment Hoping fervid moreso now he'll break thru to their heart strings Come this far— the endgame's in sight (or it might be, at least) This peewee level priest paronomasic did lay down a path of basic human emotion interface for us to find our way thru, a maze center of which contained the answer to an empathic demand Aimed to let us imagine ourselves standing in his place Feel his way Not so fast tho Labyrinthine puzzles never ones to be solved by those sans impetus to solve them in the first place And as he busts out his ultimate stanza he is met with slight resistance from such obstinate contingents Muttered boos in the back of the cafe, rumble toward the front, resound amid the huddled groupies wishing dex'd get his ass on stage already, kick this sadboy clown fool off, get the show back on an actual road Not this roughshod alley of gravel clods, rock fragments and dirt dust this asshole insists continually on leading us down Disloyal murmurs grow past a low susurrus, crescendo slowly as the rapper's tones in turn drop, flow stops, pitch slips as his shit meets a speeding up, widening fan, and he loses what chances he might've had to add these standing room only folks to his base Flinging arms wide and desperate he tries to engage them To get them to understand his flavor of misery He is failing There arises in the middle of the room a loud conversation about how disgraceful this fall of an art form is to watch To be present for That the stage isn't open mic therapy This ain't intended for attention whores To extol for sport your pain and fucking problems and dumb shit How much you loved her and how much grief you felt upon getting dumped Tough tits you soft mouthed bitch kid We are here to be entertained dammit I check the live concert feed and there're tweets pouring out at top speed, now Nonstop stream of hate from these folks Choke point of digital brokenhearted put-downs How rancid these birds chirp He is pleading for a sympathetic answer to his call of distress and we've responded by returning to our phones (boxy luminances frame our faces) And posting horrid words about him Where he won't see them till too late Odiosity the worst when first detached from any purpose Worthless words can hurt the most Strike the hardest, careless tossed-off strings of phonemes You read too much in, over-focus on the morphemes and forget the whole thing Lose the forest for the trees rightly when our trunks are burning How to respond to vicious lightning when the bright is what we need Chlorophyll for thoughts that would kill So many photons we're practically bursting of liquid light song The one form of data fire we do not strike but only kindle Emotional is chemical is electric is within our systems We are volts chaotic self-emergent klein boxes knotted like fort Knox from the outside inscrutable but the MOOS [modus operandi operating system] enthusiastic is a self-solving enigma within itself Can justify anything as long as it helps maintain the ruse of stability, in a world all our own, contained molecular within the body's headspace quantum strings we array Cross stitch and crochet Lattice fray and macramé Yarn spun practically haphazardly And only after do we ascribe meaning the waves, create a narrative from what balls we unravel Self fulfilling tapestries The Danes hanker for pastries, and Hamlet hungers for a homey form of revenge Just the scripts down which we cast types must wend, necessarily But I am going off book, he professes as last words over overwhelming dissent, sycophants plaintive in dismissive shouts of anger and resentment Then vanishes via curtains Half of this he says on stage, Half of this I make up the next day in the cozy mirrored space of my own home Remembering the legendary self-destruction that went down that night Reading idly I by LCD the storm of tweets that accompanied his blowout The opening rapper what was run offstage by the hate he brought down on his own face by opening his own face first The rest of the concert was pretty good, too PDX brought the flames and we danced till only embers sustained the vigor remaining but as the mosh swayed and ballyhooed I couldn't remove the sight thought slight of the first act's shaking grip on the mike, as beans from his mouth agape spilled in his no-pro hopeless spoken plea for empathy the man denied any more than the modicum of love one can bother to bestow upon another no more; life's lonely show