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GREENSBORO - Britteny Williams keeps her poems in a yellow notebook. Ben Jensen keeps his drums in a corner of his midnight jam room, beneath a poster of jazz singer Billie Holiday.

They don't know each other. But they blossom from the same branch.

Ben's 22, and today, he's flying to Spain. He's persuaded his two roommates - two UNCG grads, upright bassist Grey Hackelman and guitarist J.P. Smith - to go with him to play jazz in Barcelona.

They don't have a place to stay. They don't even have any gigs lined up. Essentially, they're winging it. But ever since Ben saw Barcelona twice in the past 18 months during a gig as a cruise ship musician, he was hooked.

So he wants to take his jazz trio, Solid Gold, to a city where flags of musicians fly from every street. And he wants to do it before he gets too old with too many responsibilities. He wants to have no regrets.

This all comes from a former punk rocker, a "goth-looking kid" from Charlotte who listened to Limp Bizkit, painted his fingernails black, spiked his hair and dyed it purple and black.

Then, he found jazz. A friend, he says, "hipped" him to John Coltrane and Kenny Garrett. Ben's music world changed. Four years ago, he came to Greensboro to play jazz.

That music moved him. And now, it has moved him to Spain.

At least for now.

"If I can't play for a week, I don't feel human ... ,'' Ben said Monday from his house near UNCG, where he's held a midnight jam session every week for 21/2 years. "It's something I need."

Britteny understands that.

She's 19, a former "foster kid.'' In the past 11 years, she spent time in more than 30 foster care homes and more than two dozen schools and 45 days in one dimly lit jail cell.

That was two years ago when she lived at a group home. She ripped the doors off a kitchen cabinet and hit a girl in the knee with a fire extinguisher. Back then, she says, she was a teenager angry at the world.

Not anymore. She's better, thanks to her poetry, which she started writing more and more after her jailhouse experience.

"If I get it off my chest," Britteny said, "I feel a whole lot better."

Now, she lives with her boyfriend's sister in Greensboro and keeps a Bible and two poetry books by Winston-Salem's Maya Angelou, her idol, beside her bed.

Meanwhile, she writes poems every day in her yellow notebook.

Her poems, Britteny says, describe the "scars of my heart."

In the spring, she won a first-place poetry award from a local program called Foster Friends. It was for her poem "One Foster Kid's Tattered Soul"' which was included in a blue-bound book, "Reflections of the Heart."

In the front of the book, the program organizer wrote: "This is a wonderful accomplishment. Congrats. I know you'll do amazing things."

And Britteny, a high school dropout, is trying. On Monday, she'll continue her classes at GTCC. She wants to earn her high school diploma and pursue an associate's degree in sociology so she can become a social worker.

She wants to help other foster kids. And she wants to help herself. Just read her poetry - lines like this:

I say this to you because you are somebody

Somebody special and not just a nobody

Britteny and Ben. They're using their art to write the next chapter of their young lives. And right now, they're both turning a page.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com