The Street Poets

The street poets sit with their backs

against a sidewalked wall or in the entryway

of an abandoned shop, closed up tight,

a cigarette held in tobacco stained fingers,

lost in a haze of gray smoke rising, unfiltered,

and a bottle, bagged and open, couched at their feet,

down on their luck and luckless, down and out,

the rhythms of their poems tapping inside

their heads, rocking, a soft iambic repeating itself.

The street poets sit alone at a bakery,

slowly sipping coffee, sugar rich and dark,

the buzz and hum of crowded tables

but a background to the poems echoing

inside their heads, lost words searching

for themselves, their rightful selves,

the right words that never get said flowing

as onto empty pieces of paper, crumpled

and thrown helter-skelter to the wind.

The street poets sit behind a desk, suitably

attired in suit and tie, business-like in dress

and manner, shuffling papers and numbers

and juggled phone calls, memos tossed away,

dutiful, grudgingly, this drudgery of mindless

tasks set amidst the wheels of commerce and progress

moving nowhere, day after day after day, long days

stretching into weeks and months and years to retirement,

their words, merely recited, not of their own creation.

Theirs is the world of lost poems, poems

lost in the streets in that struggle to survive,

to make ends meet, words trapped with our backs

against the wall, lonely words thrown to the wind

unheard, and mindless days going nowhere, words

muttered mechanically, not our own poetry at all,

not the poems we hear given life, giving hope

to a rich world behind this veneer we see,

this vision envisioned by the street poets dreaming.