Fall 2005 - Volume 28, Number 1

Passion

He takes the stage in a sweatshirt with the hood pulled down over his dark eyes leaving only his jagged chin  visible to the audience of hungry youths and lustful adults as they stand in one sweaty mass of t-shirted teenaged poets rubbing against mini skirted starry eyed college girls sipping beers through straws, breathing in the smoky air and exhaling muggy clouds of nothing, just waiting for the beat to pump from the massive amplifiers to transport them to another time, where all that matters is the music and the vibe and the pounding of the words as they flow from his mouth into their open ears so that they can pick  their feet up off the sticky floor and swing their hips and bob their heads and move their mouths in the mirror image of him as he bounces up and down waving his arms and sweating buckets from his temples while spewing rhymes from his thin lips as he tells his stories to them and wonders why they even care about what he has to say about love and drugs and sex and music and rhyming and all the other bullshit that he scrawls in his chicken shit handwriting on napkins and matchbooks in dingy hotel rooms while alone at night on tour, really only lonely but always hoping for more, so he puts down in words what he can’t speak and waits for the moment when he steps on stage in a sultry room filled with smoke and booze and the minds of youths waiting for him to sculpt them into a bust of himself using his stories and his beats and his lies and his movements and his sweat and his tears and his words which he finds a way to spit out in rhyme  to an audience that actually listens to him in a way his friends never can, because his friends don’t hear like the mini skirts and the t-shirts do.

-By Tovah Pentelovitch