Three of them stood there, armed for verbal prose. These poets warmed up the audience by informing us of their drunkenness and their three-way before the show, for which the guy carried with pride since the other two women were lesbians. They didn’t have a care in the world.

Ouch. But okay. I was still game for their insights…pretty sure of it. Though I wondered if they could carry it off in such a compromised state. But oh how they did. Their performance was a punctuated, yet fluid exhortation about the ills of society, delivered in part with soaring theat-ah and part rapper and personal vulnerability the likes I had never seen.

The truth of the matter nailed me where I sat. I don’t even remember what they said. I just remember being nailed.

Life is like that sometimes. You remember the moment of awareness, not what that awareness was. Reading a good book is like that. I can’t pinpoint any given plot turn or moment I am affected. I just have a sense of satisfaction when finished reading.

These poets were like that for me. I do remember their rawness, the hear-me-out, me-and-you-ness. They tapped into ME. Odd that I can remember what was wrong about the evening’s opener, eh? Yet their gift to me went other-worldly, bypassing thought to experience. If I can do that with my readers and have them walk in a daze of pure truth upon finishing my stories, I think I would have achieved my purpose for writing. I also think that on the slick surface of fault finding, we must be willing to experience ourselves and others in its midst.