The Live Lounge sits on top of the Sportsman Bar close to Nana in Bangkok. It's furnished with red vinyl booths and tall stools. Pool tables lie in the next room, cigarette smoke lingers on the deck outside and the air conditioning is turned up a bit too high.
There's a small felt-covered stage surrounded by a haphazard scattering of chairs and chatter from the adjoining bar drips through the cracks of the door. It's Valentine's Day, not that it really matters, and Bangkok Lyrical Lunacy is holding its inaugural spoken word poetry event for the year in a new home.
"Spoken word poetry -- it's a hard thing to define," says Leroy Jenkonius III, one of the co-founders of Bangkok Lyrical Lunacy.
"But if you ask me, spoken word is poetry recited using your body as an instrument. It's poetry that is meant to be performed.
"Everyone has a different style and a different way of doing things. There are different things that go into your rhythm, your breath, your inflections and what your body is doing."
The event, Cupid's Got A Gun, headlined by The Bedroom Poet on Tuesday last week, was barely about love or guns. Covering everything from freedom of speech, to a short-lived infatuation on the Skytrain, Albus Dumbledore, identity and the horrors of IKEA, the topics were broad and wide-reaching.
"I'd say that's my favourite thing -- you're just given a library of perspectives."
Jenkonius has been performing spoken word since he was 16. He had frequented Cafe Annie's in downtown Orlando every Thursday for its poetry night, and after moving to Bangkok and finding no spoken word equivalent, decided to create a space for performance poetry four years ago with a few friends.
"I like that everyone can do it straight up. Some people might argue that it might not be the most refined of art forms and I agree, but we're here to allow people to express themselves and if you ask me, that's a start."
The Bedroom Poet closes her hands around the mike and walks towards the audience, weaving words around pauses and beats under the tinge of dim orange and purple lights.
"Words feel hung in-throat like blade. Words till now were kept in-cage."
Throughout the night, there is a call for us to take control of our voices and to tell the stories that we are able to tell.
This seems to be a basic tenet of spoken word. Jenkonius believes that anyone can do performance poetry. He describes the need to get over the first breath of hesitation, to take the plunge and to surrender your thoughts to the microphone.
"A lot of the poems I write focus on confidence, self-expression and letting go of that fear. Spoken word is something that sounds good coming from the amateur and even better coming from the trained poet," he says.
Michelle D'Cruz, a performer on the night, fell into the spoken word poetry scene accidentally and sees performance poetry as a way to motivate herself to write regularly.
"I would sign up to do a show and that would force me to write -- so it was a way to keep myself accountable," she says.
"Spoken word to me, is about not being confined by genres or by style, and also about an audience that is really present and engaged."
Listening to performance poetry does not have to be a passive activity. Participation is encouraged and embraced. Pieces are frequently peppered with the pattering of finger clicks from the audience; a signal of agreeing and feeling the words of the speaker. Poets are immediately forgiven if they stumble over words and "rewind!" is shouted if a line really resonates.
For first-time performers, as a ritual of The Bangkok Lyrical Lunacy, the stage is baptised with raucous applause, whoops and ovations before the "virgin poet" even reaches the mic. The experience is very much about being vocal and also about being receptive.
"You can do the same piece, with the same tenacity, the same awesomeness, or whatever, but how it's interpreted or accepted, changes with the audience. I really like that," D'Cruz says. "I always get very nervous when I begin. I might be hyperventilating. But I feel like the moment I start, if I get the first line out, I'm fine. I don't quite understand how it works and that always fascinates me."
Questions, insecurities and realisations are thrown out to the floor. Performers allow themselves to be vulnerable and honest.
"The process is very self-affirming. People say it's self-serving too, and I totally agree. But sometimes you need that -- we encourage selfishness and we also encourage selflessness," Jenkonius says.
"What I tell people we do is that we write our own monologues, and we perform them, except there is no audition."
Perhaps that is where the power of spoken word lies. As you sit in darkness and listen to a poet describe a moment or feeling that may have otherwise been lost among all the many other instances that pass by, there is comfort in odd word combinations that seem to just click.
"Whenever people speak rhythmically, you tune in. Spoken word incorporates a lot of principles from theatre, and hip-hop too.
"An MC isn't that much different to a spoken word poet, except MCs tie themselves to a beat, whereas poets, they create their own beat and they create their own rhythm."
The Bangkok Lyrical Lunacy will be spreading words at Live Lounge on the first and third Thursday of every month starting from March.
The audience at the Live Lounge on Valentine's Day.
