Good morning, pain,

Damn you!

You still here?

I thought I had washed you away

With last night’s tears.

The tour bus of &uot;United We Jam,&uot; a hip-hop music and spoken word poetry tribute to the fallen firefighters of 9/11, made a stop in Selma Wednesday.

The tour, which began with a concert in New Orleans and will conclude in New York on Sept. 11, is being filmed by Kip and Kern Konwiser. Among the many videos and documentaries to their credit, the Konwisers helped to produce &uot;Miss Evers’ Boys,&uot; a 1997 TV docu-drama about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

This latest effort grows out of the Konwisers’ mutual interest in, and fascination with, the Underground Railroad. The tour bus, provided by the film’s principal investor, Green Bay Packers defensive end Joe Johnson, sports a lantern and the logo &uot;Poets Underground Railroad.&uot;

It also features the planned stops along the tour, including New Orleans, Hattiesburg, Miss., Selma, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Konwiser said the tour is expected to come out as a cable pay per view first, followed by video and DVD releases and even possibly an album.

The artists on the tour perform a mix of previously published material, such as Billie Holiday’s &uot;Strange Fruit,&uot; and original material. They are constantly integrating new material gleaned from the trip itself into their readings.

But this isn’t the tepid poetry reading you might remember from high school English days. While rooted firmly in the oral tradition, spoken word readings also borrow liberally from the poetry slams that are becoming increasingly popular in some large metropolitan areas. Here, performance counts almost as much as content.

Performers are apt to wander among the crowd and confront listeners face to face as they read, or even to put an arm around a listener’s shoulders and invite him to consider what the poem is saying from a more intimate perspective.

But ultimately what sets a true spoken word artist apart from the crowd, according to Konwiser, is having something worth saying.

The same, he adds, applies to any line of work.