"Does writing ever scare you?"

He asked me this as I sipped my beer beside him at the bar. That is to say, Seamus posed to me this question.

I honestly didn't have a witty or intelligent answer. Sure, when I write, I sometimes feel apprehensive about a direction I've taken (just ask my 1/3 finished second novel sitting on this hard drive), but overall, I simply let it come out and go with it.

Although you can ask my wife about the time I was reading a Stephen King novel and tossed it to the floor in frustration, whining that I'll never ever be this good a writer.

Yeah. THAT Stephen King.

Seamus - with his wife Barbara - is a regular at the County Cork Public House where I sling beers and fish and chips. He's affable, quirky, sometimes can get a little too friendly, but I always had a feeling that deep inside that rambling, dad-joking persona, there rested the heart of a poet.

So I sat there with my IPA in hand with no answer to his question. He cleared his throat and tossed out his own 2 pennies worth:

"Well, I think a writer SHOULD be scared. It means he's going into an uncomfortable place, which is where your creativity lives."

Well, dammit, I thought, if that isn't the mother-effing truth.

I turned to talk to another regular about the baseball game playing out on the set, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Seamus grab a bar napkin and a pen. Within a minutes, he handed me a brown napkin, and written in sloppy scrawl on it was the following:

"For Russ"

Russ? Rusty?
Fleeting moments...contact real.

Chosen words not wasted. In the moment of nothing to say...

a polite smile with nothing for or against.

Open to the world
looking forward...
always -

Seamus

In that moment, with the flash of his crooked smile and not so much as a spoken word, the poet had revealed himself to me.