Street Poetry in Atlanta's Little Five Points

In March 2010, I held an open photo shoot in front of Criminal Records, in Atlanta's Little Five Points.  The shoot was for the Atlanta chapter of my I...I'm Sky High project.  One of the shoot participants was Maurice.  He was chilling around the spot, saw me and my crew setting up for the shoot, and came over to see what was up.  When he approached us, he introduced himself as a street poet and asked us to give him three words and in return he gave us a freestyle poem based on those three words.

You know how sometimes, when you meet someone, you instantly know that they are a very special kind of person?  Maurice made an impression on me.

Fast forward a year and some change, I was back in Atlanta's Little Five Points, about to get into a shoot with the amazing hip hop crew, Collective Efforts, when I spotted Maurice hanging out in front of a store.  Carlton and I stopped to chop it up and reminded him of our shoot a year ago.  He didn't pass up the opportunity to freestyle for us, except this time he asked for five words.  We gave him:  collective, vision, photography, hype and Toronto.  Since we included the word "collective", we waited until the CE Crew arrived so they could hear it too.  This is what Maurice gave us...

He left out "vision", but we're not mad at it.  If you're ever in the A, stop by Little Five and check for Maurice.  You'll be glad that you did.