When your twin sanctuaries are a notebook and a boxing gym, you learn quickly that both punish anyone who isn’t fully in the room. But there is a razor-thin line between total presence and white-knuckled desperation. This piece is about that border. It’s a work of spoken word poetry on intensity, exploring how we walk that fine edge.
Drop Your Shoulders (The Pocket)
They tell me I’m too much voltage for a Tuesday night.
They say it with a nervous laugh,
stepping back a half-inch on the carpet,
like my eye contact is an unpinned grenade
and they’re just trying to drink cheap seltzer in peace.
I used to wear that accusation like hand wraps.
Tightly wound. Knuckles taped.
Sixteen ounces of dyed leather meeting the heavy bag
with the rhythm of a metronome set to panic.
Pop. Slip. Crack.
Then back to the desk, hunting words with a hatchet,
carving the fat off a sentence until the white page bleeds.
I look at the living room drowning in blue screen-glare,
the glassy eyes, the slow-motion surrender at six o’clock,
and I think: I am the only one awake.
I think the fire was proof I was alive.
I think living in the present means treating every single second
like a title fight where the bell never rings.
I push the pace.
I demand the room match my RPM.
I grip the pen until the plastic cracks in my fingers.
I clench my jaw in the clinch, biting down on the rubber,
treating every casual conversation like a battle for the center of the ring.
Speak with conviction or get out of the way.
And then, somewhere in the late rounds—
between an edit that refuses to land
and a left hook that catches me clean on the chin
because my chin was lifted, hunting—
the breath leaves my chest.
My coach doesn’t say, hit harder.
The page doesn’t say, scream louder.
They say: drop your shoulders.
That is the lesson. That is the crack of light.
I think my intensity is a weapon forged to wake the world.
It isn’t. It’s just tension.
Its panic disguised as passion.
The white-knuckled fear that if I ever let the silence sit,
the void will swallow me whole.
The knockout punch doesn’t come from a clenched fist;
it travels through a loose, relaxed arm
and snaps shut only at the millimeter of impact.
The sharpest sentence isn’t shouted;
it sits so quiet on the paper that the reader has to lean in to hear it.
I don’t turn down the current anymore.
I stop trying to electrocute the room.
Real presence isn’t an attack.
It’s the calm eye inside the hurricane—
hands up, chin tucked,
breathing easy in the pocket.
Real mastery isn’t clenching your jaw to force an outcome; it’s learning to stay loose enough to react in real time. Where in your life or your craft are you holding unnecessary tension? Drop a comment below—let’s dissect it.
Thank you for visiting with me. For more Poetry or Reviews, visit our blog at The Ritual. Copyright Mind on Fire Books.
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