Haywood St.

Around the corner
you can find a jazzman
blowing into a crystal sax.
A trance-like temper escapes
through chapped lips
with colors of
Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane
dripping from callused fingers.
An aged wall of allegories
and streets with labored backs
ring back to him his tunes
of their own biased renditions
just as drinking partners do,
murmuring the overplayed song
from the jukebox.
You'll catch this mixed chorus
only when you're halfway through
lunch on the adjacent veranda;
you shut your eyes,
sun your face and,
just for a moment,
hum along under your breath
random notes of the same key
willingly rounding out
the block's quartet.

-untitled-

Every day
again and
again
begins to die.
Time's scythe has a razor on one end
and an infant on the other.
A gnostic serpent,
I coil around the handgrip
not ready to yield any self-secured square inch
until I have poisoned the simple child
because
who really wants to see something new
when you always have a blade to your back.

^

Biography

I am 21 and currently live in Asheville, North Carolina but have lived in various parts of the continental US. In the past, I have dabbled in pottery, music, theatre (primarily Shakespeare), and have taken visual arts classes for most of my life. However, poetry is my preferred arts medium even though I have only been taking a serious interest in it for about a year. Currently I am having another poem published to be included in a compilation book of poems by the International Library of Poetry (I think that's what it is www.poetry.com). It is exciting to see a poem published, but if one other person who sees it has as much fun reading it as I had writing it, I believe that there is a true momentary connection made between the reader and the writer that is felt but unknowable in its nature.