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?
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