Slam Poem with Prompt: Urban Fantasies |
I had twelve good years of schooling before I thought I would venture out into the cold air--thick with knowledge under my dark velvet lapel--and onto city streets in the golden Autumn. Dreaming of that city, I nurtured a nestegg of money, so as to catapult me into the crowds, bookbag strapped to my back, learning about life. The first time I saw Carnegie Library, the leaves crackled, the wind blew, my madras poorboy hat flew away on a city bus ride into Fifth Avenue. I had expected nothing less than yellowed pages of mentors, feathered by a thousand and one students, the catalyst for the good life, a perfect job, perhaps, a shining lifestyle. It was right there, at that very spot, on the steps of the Cathedral of Learning that I traveled back into time, dazed by the height of that building, a cock in the sky, lit up at night like a galaxy for scholars. Even from the Mezzanine level of West Penn Hospital, where scratch surgeons go down in history, you could see the Cathedral. What a tower of strength! If I time-capsuled my memoirs, I could always go back to the days of yore, when flower-power, yuppies and local politics raised the roof of the GSLIS building, a time when I brought out my guitar to strum songs of peace and love on the lawn out there. Finding God. But it had to be ten years later, when I was thirty-one, that I met my dear girlfriend, the Vamp from NYC, a strong resemblance to God, a wider shade of pale from the women’s lib movement in her pocket, that I cut a better course and mellowed. I had never seen such fleet feet from Nebraska, a mid-western Swede with her own ideas. It was exactly then, that I loved city lights, those that lit up the streets for Emmett to play Street Band music and cause Lou’s Bar to be flooded with people and poetic vagabonds lurk in the bookshops just behind the pencil and paper of yet another cluster of deep minds. |