I was pleasing the crowd big time ... the biggest crowd I had ever pleased. Even my mother was listening. I was on the radio! Part of Michael Feldman's "Whadda Ya Know" show.

I opened up with a poem entitled "Little Guy" and received a roar of approval. Faces were beaming. God had granted me a great gift allowing me to please this capacity studio audience and all the radio listening millions, including my mother.

So ... I decided to pay tribute to ... Him ... Her ... It ... Them ... or whatever it is out there ... with something "spiritual".

Oops ... unfortunately, during the pitter-patter interview with Mr. Feldman, I had educated the audience about "slams" and how folks at a slam have permission to snap their fingers and groan at poems that don't meet their approval.

This they did ... TO ME! ... with relish.

I WAS BEING SNAPPED DOWN ON NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO WITH MY MOTHER LISTENING!

Thank God (or whatever you want to call It) that Howard Levy, a great Chicago jazz pianist and harmonica player (accompanied by a fine rhythm section) was on hand to pull me off the tracks before the train crashed.

I jumped out of "Something" mid trip and shifted into a very rhythmic poem "Nightbound" with Howard and the band backing me up ... saving face and happy to return to my seat -- humbled, hurt, and wondering what the hell that lesson was all about.

There is something of something around us.

A something of something heard sometimes

In the sound of a single instrument at play.

There is a brilliance and a death in each note

That reverberates off the string

Into the wind, into the breath of the wind;

Like a sigh that precipitates upon our perceptions

Unnamed, unsolved resolution;

Resolution building like white cumulonimbus clouds

Above city skyline stone and steel,

Above platforms and pedestrians,

Stone walks and fountains,

Above pigeons and passers-by to be.

Building more mysteriously

Than the unseen pressure of air

That builds over idle sun porch afternoons

Where idle manuscripts

Silent so long upon a silver stand

Are suddenly overturned by

New accords of weather sounding with every breath

New rattlings, new taps of the branch against the window,

New scratchings at the door begging to be brought in.

There is something in the wind, in the music, in the

loneliness

That carries us back to the beginning

To the cloud's face, to the yellow jacket's churr,

To the parting and the convergence,

To the dark red rapture within the bone's marrow.

And whatever that something is

Contained in the wind, in the music, in the loneliness,

It strains against its boundaries

To be found, to be free,

To be resolute in the storm bent bending of stems,

In the beating rapture of rain,

In the vibrations of the strings set to motion

By fingers commanding allegiance

From each of the keys as they are played

By that something of something around us.