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Kool B

  • Kool B's Wordville 1330
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    • Kool B In Voice
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Kool B

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Fish and Dragonflies

A black-top, farm-to-market, road window breeze. 

An old friend, sunrise, eases through the objecting screen.

Dawn beams softly off her morning eyes. 

Dew  sleeping, on her lazy yard, 

still cool from twilight, 

wet under a set of bare feet,

bare to the knees, 

walking into a forest of pine trees, 

striding alone to hurry back before breakfast

when the anxious kitchen writes a poem 

 

Careful are the pots not to clang, cling, or clatter

Silence matters at such an hour 

when orange tea is poured 

and good ears are needed to listen. 

 

The heavy table is familiar like dish and spoon

It's the empty sheets of sweating paper 

that are so strange 

 

She could've written a novel by now, 

but now the river is bathing her with mind adrift ... 

... fish and dragonflies. 

 

Sunday's perfect dress awaits inside a short closet

. It matches her fabriced skin ...  fish and dragonflies. 

 

She appears in the clearing

footing porchward 

where shade gathers to perch until evening

when shadows stretch upward onto walls.

 

She is complete 

... oven-toasted peach marmalade parading her sweet self

with the lure of tomorrow in her eyes

05/19/2021

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For Alvin LeBlanc, a.k.a. Kool B, a veteran of poetry slams going back to 1990, the South is nothing less than “a literary haven,” with Houston in particular “primed” for poetry. “People in the South talk,” says the 54-year-old LeBlanc, who grew up in Lafayette, La., and came to Houston to study sociology at Texas Southern State University. “They see you down the street, and they want to say something. Southern people are also used to listening to orators, preachers. From all of that, poetry has an ear.” 

LeBlanc, an instructor at the Adult Reading Center, brings his poetry to the people as producer of the online show Wordville and a member of the DJ collective Rebel Crew. In performance, LeBlanc recites his poetry in a way that is fluid, yet sounds unrehearsed, as if the words were being pulled out of thin air. In a performance at the Jazz Church of Houston, with his visor wrapped around his long, braided hair, the bespectacled LeBlanc moves gracefully as he speaks, illustrating each line with slow, simple gestures, like a Tai Chi master talking jazz: A village of windblown desperados in pursuit of a gold train loaded down with precious metals, pressed into bullions that grow like sunset, Texas to California dreamin’… It was the sound of black thunder and gallop that made the canyons quake. Let’s make no mistake about it: There’s no honor among thieves and siege is how the west was won. 

Though poetry has always been a tool for political protest, LeBlanc believes the art often reveals more commonalities than differences. “It brings the races together,” says LeBlanc. “Coming from rural Louisiana, where you would get chased home if you didn’t stay on your side of the city, poetry has shown me that people can work together, that people do have the same heartbreaks and the same anger. Poetry is where you can hear the humanness in people.”

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