In early June, amid a surging tide of protests around police brutality and its role in the death of Mr George Floyd, the 18-year-old poet Mr Playon Patrick came streaming onto the scene during a publicly broadcast Zoom town hall to discuss racial justice and police reform organised by My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. Ostensibly, Mr Patrick’s appearance that day, in his role as MBK Alliance youth leader from his native city of Columbus, Ohio, was to introduce the man of the hour, former President Barack Obama. But in performing his poem “2020 Quarantine Killings”, Mr Patrick stole the show. “A tough act to follow,” as President Obama said.

“And they ask, how do Black boys write about their city?” Mr Patrick began. “How do we know streets if we don’t know uncracked sidewalks? They ask, how do these Black boys know anything about their city?”

“I actually was writing it before I got the invitation,” says Mr Patrick. Before the call from MBK Alliance – a group founded by President Obama in 2014, to build “safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of colour where they feel valued and have clear pathways to opportunity” – first, with an invitation to perform, then perhaps to introduce the former president, and before he became a “ball of nerves” at the thought of it, Mr Patrick, a five-time winner of the Columbus’ Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day Youth Oratorical Contest and recent graduate of Fort Hayes High School, had been reflecting on the growing movement for racial justice. “I went down to a protest in my city and I saw just how passionate and emboldened the protestors were, and that passion inspired me to finish my piece about how we, as African Americans, put together this city and this country – that we, generations of people, have built so much.”

If “2020 Quarantine Killings” was inspired by what has been built, like much of Mr Patrick’s poetry, it is largely about vacancy in the US, about a negative space in the national narrative that ought to be occupied by Black people we have lost too soon, by Black stories too frequently blotted out. One of Mr Patrick’s great gifts is to make us feel the immensity of this void and feel the gravity that these losses and omissions have had on our lives, and on his.

“That’s actually really important to me,” he says, “that space. That part of history, or that dark place where we put all these thoughts about Black people. A big thing for me is portraying the anger and rage that that African Americans feel. There are a lot of stories that go untold, the stories that didn't make it out, didn’t make it to the news. And I really wanted people to take away that there is a lot of pain here. There’s pain and there needs to be change going forward if we’re even going to attempt to heal it.”

Growing up, Mr Patrick says he was a stage kid, always performing in plays. In ninth grade, though, he was looking for something more encompassing, something he could lose himself in. “And so, one day after school, I went to poetry club, and there were these two senior girls performing one of their pieces. I was like, ‘I want to part of that. I want to be able to use my voice like that.’ Right after that – it was almost instantaneous – I started writing poetry and just taking off.”

Columbus “is the place to be for the artistic scene,” says Mr Patrick. “There are so many great artists, writers you can meet.” One such writer is the incredible poet, critic and essayist Mr Hanif Abdurraqib, another Columbus native, who worked with Mr Patrick during the younger poet’s high school years. “Playon writes generously about this city,” says Mr Abdurraqib, “but does so with an ear and heart towards the wider world. His work, then, becomes an invitation. I thought the performance [in introducing President Obama] was an extension of the brilliance I’ve seen Playon exhibit not just in his writing and performance work, but also as someone who is invested in the growth of his peers and his community.”

This autumn, Mr Patrick joined the Ohio State University as a first-year student (though, on the strength of his AP exam results, he is an academic sophomore), just a four-minute drive from the downtown Chipotle where he works. He has began his studies in criminal justice and is planning to work with imprisoned youth, using poetry to give them voice to share their stories. “My poetry, my passion, it just flows through different avenues, criminal justice being one of the biggest ones,” he says. And he continues, of course, to write and perform in the Columbus poetry scene (as of this writing there is no news yet on any offers to publish, or next appearance dates).

If there is some pressure on him after his scintillating performance and his adjacency to the former president, he says it is no big deal. Or anyway it is no different that what his mother, a nurse’s aide, Columbus city schools-bus driver and barber, and his father, who works in construction, would expect of him – “You’ve got to walk right,” he says, of the values they taught him – indeed, no more than he would expect of himself.

“I feel like there has always been a weight,” he says, “as an African-American male, a lot of external pressure to be, not necessarily the greatest, but living life according to a purpose, having a goal, having a mission, being able to go out into the world and do something. Maybe that pressure escalated a little bit when I started speaking, because now you’re in the spotlight. Actually, the pressure escalated a lot,” he says laughing, “It blew off the charts.”