the poet

he sits alone,
surrounded by dozens of sheets
of crumpled, torn, and crinkled paper,

scribbles of words and fragments of sentences

littering the space between the lines,

some of them boring, cliché verses,

the odd one or two works of genius.

the echoes of words from

Kipling, Eliot, Cummings, Crane, and Morris Granatstein,

line from Rakim, Mos Def, Kweli, Common, KRS-ONE, and Guru

reverberate in his skull,

sweeping over his brain,

trickling into his soul.

he gets quiet,

sits, listens,

breathes, and feels

drops of his spirit

bleed out of the pen’s tip

and stain the notebook in his hand;

poetry, prose, lyrics

all fuse into one substance

as the streets he’s walked,

the sweat and tears he’s lost

and the victories won,

come rushing back like winds

with the power to change the course

of a river’s flows,

just for an instant,

as he writes.