February 2, 2025: "The Derelict," Fall Back, "What If?"

Sometimes I dream of doing something completely different with my life.  No poetry or words.  My dad made me an apprentice plumber when I entered high school, even though I made it pretty clear I had no interest in the trade.  My mom told me, "You should have something to fall back on."  

Probably every person in the world--from the pope to the guy begging for food on the street corner--had dreams and parents who thought those dreams were dangerously unrealistic.

Sharon Olds encounters a homeless person . . . 

The Derelict

by: Sharon Olds

He passes me on the street, his hair

matted, skin polished with grime,

muttering, suit stained and stiffened--

and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a

sign of beauty and power.  But his hands,

strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and

flap slightly as he walks, like hands of 

someone who has had polio, hands

that cannot be used.  I smell the waste of his

piss, I see the ingot of his beard,

and think of my younger brother, his beauty,

coinage and voltage of his beard, his life

he is not using, like a violinist whose

hands have been crushed so he cannot play--

I who was there at the crushing of his hands

and helped to crush them.

Olds doesn't tell the whole story here about her brother.  Obviously, there's hard feelings or estrangement.  Perhaps underlying violence and/or abuse, too.  Something that's derailed his life.  And Olds seems to take a little responsibility for his situation.

My mom convinced me to study computer science when I graduated from high school and headed off to the university.  "I think there's some future in that," she said wisely.  She knew my passions were not in numbers or lines of code, that I wanted to be a filmmaker or writer.  "It's something to fall back on, in case," she added.  It felt as though I'd already failed as a writer when she said those words.

Here I am, decades later, a published poet with a few books under his belt.  I haven't written a line of programming since I was about 21 or 22.  I never fell back.  I did work as a housekeeper for a hospital,  Painted buildings.  Bused tables.  Sold books and cigars.  Registered patients at an outpatient surgery center and cardiology office.  

But I was writing the whole time.  Look back to the beginning posts of this blog, if you don't believe me.  I never gave up on my dream.  Never settled for Plan B.

Saint Marty wrote a poem today about having something to fall back on, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Imagine that you are given the chance to start your life over.  In this new life you can choose your parents, your hometown, your travels, and your educational and/or career paths, along with your partner, children (or lack thereof), and friends.  What would you change about your life so far if you could?  Write a poem that shares about this new, alternate life.

What If?

by: Martin Achatz

What if, when I wake

up in the morning, I don't

see a finger of sun practicing

scales across the keyboard

of floor?  Or smell coffee 

burning the air like a dying

campfire?  What if instead

I was my dad, listening

to Willie Nelson on WJPD,

my hands hard as permafrost,

all my days dictated by

leaky faucets, basements

flooded with sewage, frozen

pipes and shower drains?

And what if Walt Whitman

decided to paint houses

for a living, or Emily

Dickinson castrated sheep?

How about e. e. cummings

driving a taxi on midnight shifts,

with Wordsworth as his

dispatcher?  What if Sylvia

Plath rode a garbage truck

in Harlem, and Chaucer scooped

ice cream at Baskin-Robbins?

And Shakespeare, ah, Shakespeare.

What if he was a career IRS

agent auditing the return

of Gwendolyn, who owned

a bakery called Brooks' Breads

that specialized in blueberry scones?

What if every poet followed

their parents' advice about

always having something to fall

back on?  Would that mean

Homer getting drunk night after

night at the Paradise after 

a 12-hour shift digging coal, 

telling Odysseus the bartender

how he dreams of sailing

the Mediterranean until

he runs out of baklava or Twinkies?