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FRIDAY

Apart from ripe pickup lines—”My love 4 you is as endless/as a politician’s promises”—barside chatter can be fertile ground for any poet looking for some inspiration. In a bar-set play, Modern Urban Griots relate the drama of their lives through fluid verses about family, politics, and ethnicity, intertwined with a bittersweet affair with the city where they reside: “even if you cast me aside like ward eight I will return/like a crack smoking mayor/camp out in your yard

/like it was Lafayette Park.” The group of five black poets has a witty edge that started out at a poetry cafe in Georgetown, It’s Your Mug, a haven for spoken-word performances and poetry workshops. Three years later, like true griots, Jane Alberdeston-Coralin, Hayes Davis, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Holly Bass (a Washington City Paper contributing writer), and Twain Dooley continue to keep the community voice alive. Eavesdrop on the conversation in Everything I Never Told You…Became a Poem, at 8 p.m. at HR-57, 2108 14th St. NW. $5-8. (202) 667-3700. (Ayesha Morris)