The Poetic City: “Passion” by Sly Watts

Editor’s Note: NolaVie invites poets and poetry organizations to join us in celebrating the burgeoning and versatile New Orleans community of verse. In coordination with poet and organizer Sam Gordon, we will publish weekly poems, orally and written, by and about this city we love. Please contact Kelley Crawford (kelley@nolavie.com) with suggestions.

Our first poet is Sly Watts, an Alternative Hip-Hop Artist from New Orleans, LA that implements acid jazz, trip hop, jazz, funk, drum n bass, and glitch hop into a nostalgic 90s hip-hop sound to represent the philosophers, artists, and free-thinkers governing themselves. In many of his visual concepts, Sly incorporates surrealism, abstraction, animation, graffiti, and street art. For information and booking, you can contact Sly as well as follow his work on Soundcloud, Instagram, and Facebook.

Sly Watts in City Park (Photo: Kelley Crawford)

“Passion”

The pain and distress,
I fight, through the words in verses.
Honestly, my brain has been blessed.
Complaining, you remain constrained in the mess.
I’m a train that progresses,
training the senses
to understand that in LIFE,
It’s really not
about managing to CLASP the cubicle.
Finding that different dimension in your mind
defeats the fact that you sit BACK, as usual,
doing the same OL!
You should change clothes.
Plain Jane is a strange role.
Still have the heart of a lone wolf. Now when with the lady friend, insanely, we bang souls.
Delving deep into a TRIP as I kiss her.
This chick is the world and I’ve entered her center,
And disconnected from the external forces defining me when I am intimate with her.
I grew through time. You see I’m bigger my nigga?
Not getting the picture I script as a victor?
And all you zeros are behind this motherfuckin one! Can’t you see the significant figure!?
…
Yea, that’s right. Pick my 2 feet up and strive for greatness.
In the process, trying not to become a stereotype or a fuckin statistic.
Seen as misfit.
Waiting on the time to care. Remaining dilatory.
Who’da’ known that all the worries of tomorrow could be left there once you stop to find the glory?
Many expect me to suffer and conform, but when I like life, it’s a different kind of story.
Consciousness shift in my thoughts when I grind.
Found out of your shit and lost in my mind.
Yea,
And all of this is now a journey to create a stain and escape death.
Drained, as this takes breath.
Now I’m just nobody, holding a name with his brain & his face left.
……
Wonder if I sit still sane.
Windmill brain,
With 2 sides: Ignorance & Knowledge.
Notice most don’t give you sense to fight your issues.
Applying it, see the system as a way to blow my knows into this shit just like it’s tissue.