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