Where honesty and pretension live, I live. Hope and dejection, arrogance in defeat, humility in success, continual striving. There, I am home among my people.
There are many poets in this city. The published and unpublished. The philosophers and castle builders. The lovers of language, fighting to find the right words when it’s far too easy to settle on the wrong.
Remember when you were a poet and didn’t know it? You were creating a silly rhyme at the time, but it turns out you were a poet, after all. At least some part of you was. Is.
Poets are people dreaming dangerously and outrageously. That’s you. Or if it’s not you now, it was you at some earlier time. As a child, as a young adult, just yesterday, you saw something, a glint of sunlight, stars flashing in the night sky, heard language that did the impossible and made you see anew, a song that took your breath. And you became all that is possible. If only for a moment.
What you have been you can become again.
The city in question is New York, where I took the photo. But it could just as well be your city. Your hamlet. The guy or gal with the spray paint, they’re talking about you. You see that, don’t you?
“New York Notes,” Harvey Shapiro (1924-2013)
I
Caught on a side street
in heavy traffic, I said
to the cabbie, I should
have walked. He replied,
I should have been a doctor.
II
When can I get on the 11:33
I ask the guy in the information booth
at the Atlantic Avenue Station.
When they open the doors, he says.
I am home among my people.
Where honesty and pretension live, I live. Amidst poets and fiction writers and visual artists, architects of what we’ve never before seen or heard or even considered. Hope and dejection, arrogance in defeat, humility in success, the common thread a continual striving. There, I am home among my people.