Rude World

This is a rude world.
Need a big heart to accept rude things.
This is a big world.
Need a humble hurt to let it all go.
This world need a strong person.
A strong person like you.
Remember, we lived by faith and not by sight.
We have a great power among us that can control everything.
He is bigger than this rude world.
Be brave!
You'll never walk alone.

Demon of the Road

They say he wanders every day
his day, they say, with no schedule nor plan
Roaming, wondering, at one with the road
So they mockingly name him Demon of the Road

His habit every night of every month
concentrating like a dead man, as usual
a basic meditation not read in library books
his literature, the heartbeat of life

who will be the most learned
to explain reality
who will be blessed to understand
the interweaving of fact and theory
outside the library there is much blood

outside the library there is much life
outside the library there are unwritten texts of sorrow
they are multitude of rainbows outside the library

women is read from books
her smiles and tears are read from books
her angry glances and glares are read from books
her uneasy gestures are read from books

but the Demon of the Road learns
from real streetlife

-Sujiwo Tejo

LETTING GO

How do you walk away from someone you love

And take the road of friend;

Can you reroute the course you have taken

And start over once again?

I don’t really want to let you go

But inside me I know I must;

The times we’ve loved … the times you’ve left

My heart says stay … but it’s my mind I must trust.

We have shared so much together

Laughter … fun times … tears;

Yet sometimes we can’t turn back time

We must walk away, and allow ourselves to heal.

I know one day you will be happy

And your soulmate you will find;

I know we each have one out there

Even if for now … only in our minds.

May life be gentle with you

May God’s best come your way;

And on some quiet tomorrow

You will realize things were better this way.

~ Judy Burnette

Poet's Note: Frank O'Hara

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

—Frank O'Hara