Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets.
By Jose PaduaAdded: Thursday, July 3, 2014All the out of business auto body shops
on this slow highway, all the abandoned
buildings with peeling paint, the vacant
lots overgrown with junk trees and weeds
bounded by chain link fences, all the things
we could never fix and threw away, all
the insane metaphors for living, the fake
equation of ideas, the pretty words that
soar today in a shallow heart as wisdom
before giving way to tomorrow's clever
observation, commandment, or list
of the neglected and overrated, and all
the shut ups and neverminds we breed
with our lips because we have never been
upon the verge of either idiocy or genius.
This is not where you belong, alone in this
tiny town without mending, this is not
the long endless line that waits for an exit
out of city sleep, this is not the thick wall
you can't hear through. So go, like everything
that has decayed before us, everything that has
shattered so beautifully, go into that street
like a man crashing a parade with smelly clothes
and dirty skin, go into that building that's on fire
because the sky is full of smoke and you are water.
Jose Padua’s manuscript, A Short History of Monsters (University of Arkansas, 2019), was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Jose Padua’s work appears regularly at the online journal Vox Populi. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.