Ghandi said - “Fear has its use but cowardice has none.” What I want to talk about is fear manifesting itself on such a level that you think you’re going to collapse, or if you don’t collapse you’ll quite literally shake yourself to peices.

I’ve done my stints onstage. Been in a small number of plays, and I played trumpet thru most of middle- and high-school career. So the concept of being onstage isn’t exactly new to me. But something about doing poetry, just me onstage, alone with only my words to protect me. I freak the fuck out. No other phrase will really cover it quite right.

Hands sweating to the point where you can rub them against one another and hardly feel it?

Check.

Stomach flopping about like a freshly landed fish, or Michael Jackson in the midst of one of his more impassioned dance moves?

Check.

It’s horrible, I think I get affected this badly because it means so much to me.

I of course want to believe that I don’t give a flying fuck about what you or anyone else cares to think about me, but put me in a room filled with people who even I am forced to call my peer group, and shit yeah, I care.

And then there’s the simply fact of my poetry; when I step up on stage, I feel like I’m cutting out a vital portion of my spiritual anatomy and hoisting it high over-head, so that the assembled can see. “Hey everybody! Take a good close look, this is what defines me!”

And I love it, once I’ve been summoned up there, and I’m staring out at the faces. Once the words are coming out of my mouth I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s one of those moments that folds back into itself to redifine time, a fluidly frozen frame of three minutes that takes forever, and is gone before your heart can settle into tempo again.

I really should have written this in installments, because the terror is gone now. My stomach has finally decided to unclench and my head, (well that’s never quite right but there are other reasons for that)

The point, if there is one, could be that you’ve got to do the things that freak you out. It’s the only way you grow. Myself, I’m inordinantly proud that I didn’t puke before I hit the stage this time, that’s a first for me. I’m going back more frequently too, back into that den of fears and whirl-wind highs. I’m gonna beat the shit out of this particular fear, just sounds like fun.

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