New York ? Friday night, Lower East Side. A young poet takes to the stage and touches his knitted cap, hushing the audience of a few hundred.

Kahlil Almustafa taps his chest with the microphone, simulating a heartbeat, and begins speaking in low tones. His words soon escalate, soaring and diving like a bird on the wind:

“Bomb your country, bomb your culture.

No running water, only Coca-Cola.”

“You KNOW that’s right!” someone calls from the audience, a twentysomething crowd that includes women in Muslim headscarves and preppy men in khakis.

The Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has begun.

The spare, brick-walled cafe has been called the nation’s spoken word Mecca. It has helped birth films and books, Broadway shows and new celebrities over the years. For many young poets, particularly blacks and Latinos, it has simply been home.

Cross-cultural interaction

In a city where diversity often means elbowing an ethnic cross-section of people to get a seat on the subway, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a rarity — a junction for cross-cultural interaction that goes beyond the superficial.

“The work is autobiographical … and you have to engage with the performer,” says Karen Jaime, a poet who plays host to the Friday night events. “It’s about people of color giving voice to the voiceless.”

Miguel Algarin, one of the cafe’s founders, says the poetry is about “going from the inside of your chest to the outside of your chest with some accuracy. At the end of the night, if you’ve really been listening, you leave with a lot of information and passion.”

That’s what Algarin intended when he began hosting poetry readings in his East Village living room in 1973. The idea was to give his mostly Puerto Rican neighbors “a space to speak out from,” he said.

But it got too crowded, and the retired Rutgers University literature professor moved the gathering to a local bar. In 1980, he and other founders formed a nonprofit organization and expanded the offerings. Now, every night except Mondays, there are artistic events, including live music and theater at the gritty, sparsely decorated spot in a neighborhood that is steadily gentrifying and bringing itself back from decay.

“There’s always poetry, no matter what,” says Julio Dalmau, the cafe’s manager.

Hip venue

Regulars love the cafe because it manages to be hip without trying to be. The cover charges are $7 to $15 — compared to $25 and up in other night spots in the city — and an evening there never fails to include topics racial, emotional and political.

The Nuyorican “brings me back to reality,” says Angie-Lee Vasquez, a 23-year-old college student and insurance worker from Brooklyn. “As a Puerto Rican in New York, we have our own social injustices. It’s a way to share what we are and who we are.”

Popular events

For young black and Latino artists, it is one of only a handful of places in New York City where their work is highlighted and celebrated, they say. Here, unfettered, they rhyme and chant about living young and brown in the city.

“I’ve never experienced anything like the first time I performed at the Nuyorican. It’s a poet’s dressing room. It’s embracing,” says Narubi Selah, a playwright, poet and actor who performed her 90-minute play, “The Classifieds,” in early April. Selah and another actor portrayed all the characters.

The most popular events are Friday night competitions — called poetry slams — which started around 1990. Slams were invented about five years earlier in Chicago as a way of reinvorgating the art form, according to Poetry Slam, Inc., a Michigan-based nonprofit. Poets began writing verse intended to be spoken aloud, and they enhanced their words using elements of theater and music, blurring the lines between poetry and performance art — and heightening competition.