in a million humdrum worlds,
I’d like to change my name
and have a new house number to go by
each and every time I died
and started life all over again.
I wouldn’t want the same name every time
and the same old house number always,
dying a million deaths,
dying one by one a million times:
-would you?
or you?
or you?
Similar Posts
THESE are the tawny days: your face comes back.
The bashful mornings hurl gray mist on the stripes of sunrise.Creep, silver on the field, the frost is welcome.Run on, yellow balls on the hills, and you tawny pumpkin flowers, chasing your lines of orange.Tawny days: and your face again.
Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire;
And the yellow tongues climb.Red lines lick their way in flickers.Oh, sputter, logs.Oh, dream, Nancy.Time now for a beautiful child.Time now for a tall man to come.
THE GRAVE of Alexander Hamilton is in Trinity yard at the end of Wall Street.
And in this yard stenogs, bundle boys, scrubwomen, sit on the tombstones, and walk on the grass of graves, speaking of war and weather, of babies, wages and love.An iron picket fence … and streaming thousands along Broadway sidewalks … straw hats, faces, legs … a singing, talking, hustling river … down the great street…
I saw a famous man eating soup.
Into his mouth with a spoon.His name was in the newspapers that daySpelled out in tall black headlinesAnd thousands of people were talking about him.When I saw him,He sat bending his head over a platePutting soup in his mouth with a spoon.
I know a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January.
His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to whom he may call his wares, from a pushcart.
There’s Chamfort. He’s a sample.
Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye.And this Chamfort knew how to writeAnd thousands read his books on how to live,But he himself didn’t knowHow to die by force of his own hand—see?They found him a red pool on the carpetCool as an April forenoon,Talking and talking gay maxims and grim epigrams.Well,…