Secret Vespers

I want to meet you without ever planning to meet, sit next to you on the subway and get off at the wrong stop. We’ll change our clothes, buy five dollar outfits and chase cats through alleys, steal the cameras of tourists to take pictures of graffiti, follow them back to their hotels to give the items back. We’ll find a protest and teach an anarchist to sing, set the unwanted dogs at the SPCA free. We’ll ride glass elevators in the financial district and give crayon drawings to vice presidents. We’ll share pies with hipsters and run up stairs until we puke, shower in cold water, in our clothes, and kiss to keep our lips warm. We’ll do the single most honest thing at work to get us fired, live by selling whispers in a gallery. We’ll not know each other’s name for at least a year, and never use words between sunset and sunrise.

As Timothy Green puts it, “Poetry is everywhere… It happens by accident all the time.”

The idea behind his Found Poetry Project is to see what happens when you look for those accidents. Maybe a note on your power bill sounds like a haiku, or a message your drunk friend left sounds like free association. See what happens when you write them out like poems!

I found something and emailed it in. It’s called Public Retraction, and the original source should still come up if you google it.

I’ll leave you with a couple of links:

• http://www.foundpoetry.org/blog/2009/03/public-retraction/ to the poem I found and formatted.
• http://www.foundpoetry.org/blog/rules/ to the rules for the Found Poetry Project.

I enjoyed doing this. It didn’t take effort or inspiration or angst. It made me notice how odd and beautiful and seductive the ordinary language around me is, things I might never have thought about twice. The project is up and running, and absolutely anyone is allowed to try. I’d love to hear about the poems you find. If you like, then leave them as comments or leave links to them.

I don’t have a plan in the world. I have the wide open sky and a bag of dried mangoes. My last girlfriend called them slices of sunshine.

I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.

I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.