Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

The year was 1998 and I’d recently freed up my schedule so that I could go to this poetry open mike at a place just down the road called Best Price Books & Coffee .  At the time there were a lot poets every week.  We’d meet up before and write or talk and get to know each other and then the host would come in, set up the mike on the patio (during the warm weather) or inside in the back room of the coffee house.  There’d be poets, musicians, comedians, random street people who’d stand up and ramble for a few minutes until the host would sort of shoo them off stage, but everyone got to speak if they wanted to.  The notion of hate speech was a relatively new one, and I didn’t really get all the nuances.  I’m a white, cis-gendered male that comes from a middle class family so I have never experienced discrimination or been the victim of hate speech but I know that the people who I liked to listen to did not look like me or share my background.  They spoke with a conviction and