I got some love poems. Some socially conscious poems. All kind of poems. Like this haiku: "It's always the poor buying exspensive Clothing, The Rich get it free ." The stone faces of young men in do-rags and puffy jackets cracked into knowing smiles.

A girl holding tight to a plastic-covered baby carriage leaned forward. "You from Harlem?" she asked. "If I had money, I'd buy that thing. It sounds interesting."

Blue started out as a boxer. But boxing is a tough sport, and so he turned to cutting hair. Six years ago, he looked out the window of the Harlem barbershop where he was working and began writing poems about what he saw Dogs, Methadone clinics, Three-card monte and scantily clad Women. All this led to a collection of 38 poems called "Corner Stores in the Middle of the Block."

Maybe he could have ended up in that web of agents and publishers and appearances at Barnes & Noble. But who needs it? T

he market was right there, coursing through the underground, in front of his eyes. A shop in Times Square printed his books, 1,000 copies at a shot. He has gone through 12 printing, selling the books for $5 each.

Skipping through the Bowling Green station, Blue jumped on the uptown No. 5. Putting away the poetry book, he tried to drum up some interest in his novel, which he wrote and self-published last year under the nom de plume Brad Bathgate. "It's a love story about a girl named Apple and a guy named Chuck," he explained. Apple is a fast woman who is into nightclubs and pool halls and coaxes the naïve Chuck into running guns up from Kentucky. "That's when it gets pretty ugly."

But Blue's life isn't that exciting, he confessed. It's just about hawking words. "People think you got a sob story. I don't have a sob story. I just got my books." JENNIFER BLEYER March 13, 2005