The First Poem i ever Wrote

I'll never forget the day my friends introduced me to this new and exciting place for "Christians" to gather; the “JAVA-LOO-YAH”. This was a pivotal moment in my adolescents. It was probably 1995-1996; I was new to Panama City Beach Fl. A few years earlier I had lived in a desolate town called Santa Rosa Beach. We had moved out of Miami after Hurricane Andrew leveled my family’s home.
It was such a big change leaving the Miami life behind and entering into the new realm of the southern (Northern Fl) "Country" ways. Goodbye café con-leche hello grits.
In the midsts of all of those transitions I had discovered a new outlet and friend in music. Though my mother had started me with piano lessons years earlier as a way to occupy my A.D.D. fingers, it would be years later before music truly grabbed a hold of my soul. My family was not music or art enthusiasts; I’d dare to say they were enthused at all by anything. I suppose my father’s passion burned for a good boxing match or Kung-Fu film, but for the most, my family embraced a mundane livelihood, where one moment followed the next. I liken my childhood to a nut cracker doll on a grandmother’s shelf. As for my parents interest in music, I guess you could say that they liked music as much as the next. My mother fancied herself a singer, but her concert hall was the kitchen and audience was found in my brother, my sister, myself, our dogs and the neighbors who luckily never called the police.
I combed through old gospel greats like; Al Green, Donnie McClurkin, Larnelle Harris, Michael English, The Winans and of course the legendary Rev Shirley Ceaser. I found myself in want. I cannot say that this music satisfied me; it was simply what i had to listen to. As much as I respected the roots behind the passionate music and the sincerity and power in the vocals, Gospel music was not my forte. But given the music i had at my disposal, i was either listening to my mothers gospel music or my fathers throw back artists- Issac Hayes, Barry white, Bee-Gees, Roy Orbison, Whitney Huston; I absorbed what I could. I often felt like I was lost at sea trying to pick up radio stations with my walkman through my bedroom window.
I have spent the last fifteen years searching for something in music. There is something profoundly spiritual about music; I cannot quite put my finger on it. It’s the aspect that cannot be formulated, the essence that cannot be reproduced. It’s a one-shot deal; the moment when the music transcends the artist and plucks the heart string. I have been searching for the “element” in the song, the one that causes a person to drive by their house and make one more lap around their neighborhood just to hear a particular part in a song. There’s mysticism in music, when a crowd is hushed, and everyone is in unity simply receiving a melody or a lyric. I do not know what it is, or how it happens, but as I said before, I feel I have been lost at sea, trying to find this missing link in the evolution of the heart and mind.

So now, I’m standing in the “Java-Loo-Yah” coffee house and I feel this “element” in the air. I’m looking at some middle aged beach bums, on a makeshift stage reading their own poetry and singing half written songs. This led me to some of the most amazing moments in my life. A time of self discovery and definement.