This live poetry night brings writers together in a welcoming, appreciative environment, with every attendee receiving a chapbook featuring tonight’s poems.

Desperate For Love is happening more frequently – in the words of affable compere Alan Hay, a cross between Alan Moore and Bill Bailey, “We’re like a tennis ball-serving machine!”

The poems were not all about love, but celebrated intoxicating words in punchdrunk streams of language.

It was difficult to understand some of the more complex ones, especially those which were read quickly, but certain phrases stuck in the mind: drunks in the wee small hours “lolling like manatees,” or a city like a “pyroclastic flow of trash”.

All shades of relationships were mentioned, from the bawdy to the despairing.

“This is the bad boy!”warned Mat Colegate sardonically, introducing poems inspired by London and the loneliness of urban living.

They ranged from a bumptious ode to female buttocks to an eloquent testimony of isolation: “I haunt the shops like a gentleman ghost”.

Lucy Harvest Clarke’s intriguing poems are also inspired by different places, and she read rapidly and rhythmically, sidling up to the microphone.

In Spain, she noted, language is “pronounced like phosphorus,” while London seems a “blazing city of No”.

Tim Atkins concluded with “translations, versions and perversions” of Petrarch and Horace, intermingling the literary and prosaic with tributes to “time, her eyes, and lovely bacon”.

Finally, the barman announced he’d been inspired to write a poem too, and the animated audience called out for dancing to begin.