DC/Harlem
- DC/Harlemfor duke ellington
i gotta scholarship. gonna learn how to paint classics. i’m a colorful guy wear regal clothes i’m gonna give the world beautiful night portraits. people. places. hearts that break and mend. negro worlds that reek of grits and gravy. cities full of fancy cars. perfumed ladies dressed carefully for church postal workers. pool sharks. domestics. dancers.
but i wanna play piano. make mood my medium rhythm my rhapsody. harmony swinging swaying my urban indigo canvas conveying the colored relics of my youth.
howard theatre hanger [End Page 151] headed for harlem make my living brushing broad strokes producing passionate paintings musical murals a sumptuous universe of sensuous melody telling emotional tales of old black women with wrinkled saddened faces educated men driving taxis down american streets full of forgotten dreams that are now just sleepless nights years and years of the same old blues tune played on juke boxes in familiar places where the drinks are cold women are pretty music is hotter than neighborhoods we crowd during summer days in the western world where my piano has become my paint brush . . .
Brian Gilmore is an attorney who lives and works in Washington, DC. Elvis Presley Is Alive and Well and Living in Harlem, his first volume of poems, was published by Third World Press (Chicago) in 1993. He has also published poems and essays in a number of anthologies and periodicals, including Soulfires, In Search of Color Everywhere, Obsidian II, and Nation.
