Poetry While You Wait: Union Square

In the early evening today I was saying goodbye to a friend I’d met with near Union Square. On my way to the subway, near where the dancers and musicians usually congregate on most afternoons, I noticed a man seated at a small desk with a typewriter, and a sign posted: Poetry While You Wait.

I approached him, got into a brief conversation, and I decided I’d like a poem for $5. He typed it up on the spot, using the brief exchange of information we’d shared as a starting point. People came by, took photos, asked me to move out of the way to get photos, I obliged. When he had ran the paper through the typewriter a few times, revising, he finished and read it to me.

The poem:

layering

(poem for an arrival in new york)

Stale thoughts yield to fresh paint, jazz

exploded into a tipping point, a fulcrum

on which to balance improbable structures.

old stories break open as an egg into

a pan; when told they are consumed

and we move on. Meanwhile dream of shadows

resolving into light- no studio complete without

chiaroscuro from the windows or the glow

of screens, from a canvas far too radiant- it

must be covered up

-allan andre nyc 9/5/13

If you see him, please do yourself a favor & talk with him, and definitely ask him for a poem. And if you don’t see him, have a look here: http://www.allanandre.net

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