For the Love of Money by Omar Tyree

week. I’ll spend the last week of June back at home, and fly right back out to LAX. The weather and the terrain is beautiful out here. Wait until you see it.
    â€œWe didn’t have any palm trees in Baltimore,” she joked.
    I told her that I was running late for my poetry reading and got her number.
    â€œYeah, you did write poetry,” she remembered. “You think you might want to write screenplays or something out here? I have connections if you do. I know a woman who works with the screenwriters guild.”
    Man, talk about things moving fast! I began to wonder what took me so long to try that big move to the West Coast myself.
    â€œWell, we’ll sit down and talk about all of that when I get out there,” I promised her.
    I left for my poetry reading with the biggest head in the word. I just
knew
that I would put my thing down once I got out to California. I was cruising in my black Toyota Camry on Lincoln Drive and heading toward downtown on air. You couldn’t tell me anything!
    When I arrived at the Philadelphia Arts Bank Cafe on Broad Street, I was still smiling. It was a typical cafe with tables, chairs, coffee, tea, and pastries that opened up for nighttime events with a small front area that they used as a performance stage. You could look right inside from the busy traffic on Broad Street.
    Lil’ Lez’ said, “Damn, Tracy, was it
that
good?” She was referring to sex. Leslie Pina, a half-pint of a sister with the cute looks that made guys love to call her their shorty, could sound as horny as
three
women. When she wasn’t doing a poetic rap thing, she usually wrote about love and fucking, and not necessarily in that order.
    I said, “This has nothing to do with sex. I’m just feeling good tonight.”
    She smiled at me and asked, “Are you sure?”
    I just shook my head at her and grinned. I found a table with an open chair, which was hard to do, because the place was packed that night. I took a seat right as Stephanie Renee was taking the stage, a poet/performer/ writer/singer/actor/events coordinator and publisher of a newsletter called
Creative Child.
    Stephanie’s style was part everything, like mine. Humor. Frankness. Love. Community. Dialogue. Human politics. Theatrical, and many times she was very spiritual. Her poems were much more spiritual than mine. She could sing too. I couldn’t hold a note to save my life.
    I sat there and listened to Stephanie do her thing, and my smile faded away. I thought,
What makes my writing any better than hers?
Stephanie had more range, more performance experience, and had been pushing her creativity for years, but she was more or less local. I wanted to be bigger than that with everything that I did.
    Next up was Jill Scott. Jill could be as sexual as Lil’ Lez’ sometimes, but Jill’s shit got raw and real deep on you. In fact, if I had to pick one sister to represent in a national poetry contest from Philly, Jill Scott would be very hard to deny. She cleared your ears and mind out whenever she performed, and filled you back up from head to toe with whatever the hell she was talking about. However, her style could be mundane, because you already knew what you would get with her.
    I sat there and listened to everyone’s poetry before I did my three pieces. I didn’t even feel like reading them anymore. Everyone there would have lovedto take their art to the next level, and I was sure that screenwriting and acting would have ten times as many talented and driven people out in California.
    I did my first two pieces with little energy, then I introduced my new poem.
    â€œI just wrote this one on Monday, but this is how I’ve been feeling lately, because I realize that all of us would love to shine on a major stage one day. I mean, that’s just the American way. Chase your dream, right?
    â€œAnyway, here it is, ‘Recognition’:
    â€œI had a big date