Poetry, but in the narrative of a story - so not poetry but poetic.

The following excerpt from "Sonny's Blues", by James Baldwin, is sublime for at least  three reasons. First, it sounds great; it is pure poetry but still makes sense. The boys (students in the narrators high school math class) are growing up fast and suddenly realizing that they will not get far from where they already are, literally, and especially figuratively. Second, the sentence is not poetry, but in a narrative short story, where poetry usually makes less sense than when it is alone, as in a poem. But here, here it is awesome. The final reason this sentence is good stuff, the least important reason, is that the sentence uses the serial comma, and the parenthetical comma, to make what could easily be two almost useless sentences into one that is worthy of quoting on this blog. "These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities."