Five Nights of Bleeding

Johnson's first published poem was "Five Nights of Bleeding" which was later included in “Voices of the Living and the Dead” and in his second book, “Dread Beat and Blood”. It was written for Leroy Harris, a black youth stabbed at a party in South London. The poem was transitional. Its focus on the local, on the particulars of black life and struggle in London, would become typical of the poetry that his audience would read and hear in his books, performances, and recordings. And the rhythm is strongly that of the sound-system reggae that is the imaginative sound track for the events that occur in the poem's narrative, much in the way that the actual music would become integral with Johnson's performances. Yet the carefully chosen diction in the poem and the straightforward syntax were those of standard English, and there was no attempt at the Jamaican orthography which, as Mervyn Morris has noted, became fairly consistent in Johnson's later work.
"Five Nights" clearly exhibits what Johnson himself described as "the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English," and in some lines of the poem the creole strains to emerge:



This linguistic tension posed a choice for Johnson, and in 1973, in addition to standard English, he began using a creole phonemic system of his own devising. "Yout Scene," the opening poem of his "Notes on Brixton" sequence, and his first to be written entirely in creole, provides a clear example. A comparison of the first stanza of the poem in manuscript with the revised published version illustrates Johnson's concern to find a satisfactory rendering of the sound of the creole:


Of the six poems in "Notes on Brixton," four were completely creole in syntax and orthography, anticipating the choice which Johnson made by 1974. From that year, almost all of his poetry is clearly and confidently creole.

Linton Kwesi-Johnson: poetry down a reggae wire by Robert J. Stewart