My morning poem

I didn’t think of this.

I thought of the country side, in deep greens with enticing blue skies,

a little white house and a horse.

And so I leave my office, in the big city, high up off the earth gazing down at the streets below

full of grays and browns and bricks.

The sky is getting dark—work is done, and home I go,

but as I start to near the subway (me and a thousand other commuters like drops of water on a windshield during a hurricane)

I hear the lonely, poetic, inspiring notes of a saxophone, rising

carrying me, filling me with feeling, asking all sorts of questions providing all sorts of answers colors, pinks and greens and limes and lemons and luscious reds until it all just explodes,

and I find my feet at the edge of an empty instrument case.

I’ve got some change somewhere here, rummaging through pockets, toss 45 or 50 cents in, the musician doesn’t even look at me, he just stands eyes closed playing his saxophone at the entrance to the metro,

all these suits walking by, suits living in their own little dull-gray-brown-brick world.

But he’s not dreaming of the country… Oh no, he is here, in the city, the urban nitty gritty, he just sees it with all sorts of colors and places and smells that the suits don’t see but that I want to see, that I need to see if I’m going to make the city life work for me.

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[ R e t u r n F r o m W h e n c e Y o u C a m e ]