Last night I was was able to perform a poem at a slam. It was my second time there, but my first time actually competing.

I felt sick all day and kept running into the bathroom.

My skin was hot and the area around my chest and neck were flushed red. My heart was pounding. I thought something was wrong with me but slowly I started to realize that I was actually nervous.

Nervous?

What the fuck?

I don’t get nervous. I love public speaking – but damn, I was actually nervous. I had to call Ramona at one point for some moral support because I thought I was having a panic attack. She really helped me calm down.

It got worse when I arrived at the slam and realized:

Oh – holy shit, there are actually rules to this thing.

You need your poem within a certain time, there are two rounds, you need two pieces (in case you make the second round), generally you should have them memorized.

Whelp…

I spent the next two hours scrambling to edit my poem down for time, trying to find an old poem I had written and pull it up on my phone, practicing hand motions, and generally, freaking the fuck out.

Even when the slam started and I sat down by Helena and Ramona, after ditching them for a while to practice, I was still mumbling my lines to myself. Over and over, hoping I wouldn’t forget.

These girls are seriously the best for putting up with my crazy.

It all worked out though, I got to read my poem, which I think is high-fuckin-larious. (I am of course, 100% biased) It is also incredibly geeky, filled with fun-facts about all the crazy shit Einstein tried to pull. It’s weird and off-beat and I know that the content is different from what most people talk about.  (Physics, by the way, makes great material for poetry.)

Up on stage I couldn’t help myself from shaking, so I tried to hide it by bumping up my volume, moving around, looking at the audience, and by the time I had finished I wish I had had more time. And was bummed I had gone later in the night because a lot of the audience had left by the time I got to perform. 

The best part, though, was when the “sacrificial poet,” or the first poet to read, complimented me on my piece, calling it pure genius. He was a well known performer in our circuit and a comment from him was worth it’s weight it gold.

(Which I now realize would be worth nothing because words don’t have any physical weight … whatever, it sounds good. Don’t read into it too much.)

Call me an egoist, if you will, but a little bit of praise here and there doesn’t hurt. And this particular bit made my heart glow.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make round two. But that’s okay. I felt accomplished.

I read a poem that I had written in public. It was like exposing my soul to a crowd with knives and sharp, pointy, sticks, and other shit that could slice you to ribbons. But they didn’t. They used the knives and sticks to cut open their own souls so we could all be vulnerable together. It was pretty amazing.

The support that you get from these absolute strangers is pretty dang awesome. I mean sure, some poets are obviously a little arrogant. When they speak to you they have this strange way of talking down to you in circles, so that you don’t really realize it’s happening until it’s done.

But then you have people who are genuinely nice. Who want you to do well, and couldn’t care less about the judge’s scores – because seriously, how can you really judge another persons’ poem? And objectively? Yeah, that’s just not going to happen.

It’s the people who don’t give a shit. Who are reading their poems because they want a platform and don’t care if they advance or not. Who are looking to connect with the audience, these are the poets who are truly awe-inspiring.

And ironically, they’re the ones who tend to get perfect tens.

I will most definitely be back in the future to read more poems. I have a few I’ve been working on and although I’ll have to adapt them a bit to the “slam” style, I’m looking forward to being a future member of this great community of writers.

Overall,

I was terrified.

I was unprepared.

But I did it.

Yippy-kay-yeay-motherfucker.