Fear and Performance

I used to read my poetry at "open mics" all across the Phoenix area. I don't read poetry like other people do. My performance is just that. It's more about the act than about what I am reading, and as such, I managed to give really good performances to really mediocre poetry. Some of the posts in this blog will either be audio or even video because sometimes the text doesn't really portray what I want it to. Much of my writing is littered with parenthesis of what action I need to take while reading. In this blog I hope to give a little bit of back-story on each piece and adequately portray not just the writing, but the performance of the piece. For example: When I performed "K is for Love" I was scared out of my mind that people would think that I was actually spewing racist hate speech, so I used to speed through the first half to get to the part in which you could be assured that I wasn't pushing some KKK agenda. I did love reading that poem first though, because nothing gets people's attention like the first two lines. I promise that if you yell, "He's a man in the Ku Klux Klan" everyone in the room will stop talking and give you their undivided attention until you are finished speaking. I actually performed this poem in a bustling bar one night. I was the only poet amongst many musicians and when I started with that line everyone stopped talking and you could have heard a pin drop. It's quite the attention getter.