Back and Forth.

My friend Jay likes her birth date.
She says its a call to action: March Fourth.

Her dread locks are limp tower blocks, forehead
for sky, nose, a shrouded figure speeding by,

back packed with sketchbooks and gas masks,
jeans patched more times than he’s matched sticks

to spliffs. He is a loose hoodied slouch
with spray cans, crouched by a

————————————————————-

Still to decide how to link these together, but the question I am fighting with is how to end the poem

———————————————————–

a poverty stricken kitten

skips across the sprinkled streets, glitter litter
crisps the pavement, stone splits into doorway,

out whiffs a break beat as he enters it. Door shuts
with such finality it’s as if he never existed.

Never pressed a nozzle to colour walls,
or the rapper’s vocals never coloured bars…

The silence is blasphemous as the blues
played backwards, un-invented, trapped

in the fingernail of a field hand so straight-
jacketed, so stitched, he won’t twitch for shit,

and the unplayed guitar riff, like ghost graffiti,
reefs over his heart and dies.
———————————————————————

I am not a massive consumer of the green stuff, but have dabbled in it once or twice. I get kicks from discovering its various literary incarnations, at least 50 including ‘grass, weed, green, Mary J, Jamba, Spliff, Ganja, Bud, Blunt, Yay, Joint, Jay,’ or as Black Thought, front man for the Roots calls it, ‘The Tenth Letter’. It is insinuated in this poem… the graffer’s jeans are patched ‘more times than he has matched sticks to spliff’ and I choose to play on with ‘Jay’ as a term for weed, which fits with the slightly surreal nature of the poem as Jay’s face morphs into the city..

————————————

Jay, I once smoked your name and a glimpse
of what I might have been, had I courage

enough to March Fourth, make canvas
of walls, and music of bars frightened me.

Flecks of if it speckle roads like blues riffs,
whiffs off aerosol or faint hip hop beats

But I trapped them in verse and it’s good  for me.

—————————————–

This ending will definitely change.