As I turned into Laurel street, the small meaningless street off Somerville Ave, I remembered… Poetry. It had been long since I had thought about it. As a child I had written a poem or two. The feeling had made an impression on me, of formless ideas becoming words and being printed into rhythms, sounds, rhymes. A feeling so intense, so close to the truth of things, that I declared myself poet. But I wrote no more. I bought many notebooks, I looked out of windows here and there, sometimes for hours straight, I dressed and acted like a poet, I had all the thoughts of a poet, and my life imitated a poet’s life to the detail. Only one thing was missing: the goddamn poems.
And now there it was, poetry, staring me in the face. Asking me “where is it? when are you going to write me?” I entered the little street. I sat down on the abandoned little bench I hadn’t noticed until that night. It lasted a moment or two. Not enough to write anything down. I walked back home… blank, like all my little notebooks…