a life less ordinary…

is that you wake up to your own thoughts
and you go to sleep with your own dreams.

being productive in your mind and soul
is not so hard as it seems.

you function only as an essential human being;
only care what your heart is seeing.

the jobless one works only for his own spiritual wealth,
seeking not to impress but to develop himself.

thinking and acting upon individual wants
is the badge of dishonor that the unemployee flaunts.

for nobody likes such an overt display
of pure self-service; it would appear to betray

the foundations of society, which dictate with clarity
that an unproductive person is a freak,
a useless, disgusting hilarity.

getting too close to this placebo of a citizen is contagious,
for you may become one, too–
left to search for your voice, with no one to give it to you.

so the judged and the judges are left shaking their heads,
and nobody verbalizes what really needs to be said.

the glory of being unemployed is that you’re really working full-time
for the divinist company of all, the glory most prime.

and you’re doing it for free, but with benefits galore;
such as the ability to fall asleep exhausted and yet
wake up wanting more.

it’s the cushiest of jobs, and you never even had to apply for the position;
you just sprung from the womb–it was actually a nice transition.

now everyone is telling you get a real job, get to work, make a career.

and you think you’ve been doing just that
every hour
of every day
of every year.

We’re poets, and we don’t see the world the way other people do. We don’t always want to wake up in the morning and repeat the same motions over and over. We try to understand, and we question. We’re not innocent, but we don’t sell ourselves either. We speak, and against a good deal of adversity, say what’s on our minds. We appreciate what makes Wall Street work just as much as we love what rocks the soul of Harlem. We search for beauty because it’s what makes us feel alive, what makes us want to dance, want to offer ourselves to the glory of living.

10-19-07 Rainy day. Taxis honking. Wet spring rolls. Dancing drip drop on the roof top. Cantonese jabber. Drip drip.

Written on Sunday, October 16, 2007 Today I went to Culture Fest 2007 in Battery Park. In the booth of the East Side Tenement Museum there was a woman dressed in costume, acting as an immigrant living in an early twentieth-century ... [Continue reading this entry]