Every day I walk this path
with the cracks in the sidewalk.
Not the ones meant to be there,
but the ones from rain and sun and footsteps
beating down day after day
with a drum-like beat.
Every day I get pulled to the chain-
link fence, to the little inhabitants of it,
little flittering bodies that pose in the diamonds,
making a moment-in-time home of it
before they’re off to a new scene.
Sometimes I wish I were the birds,
fluttering around with no real purpose.
I flutter every day, but not with real abandon,
but instead with panic and the sense of
how little time there is in a day.
I get close to the heart of the campus
and once again am drawn to the size
of not only the buildings,
but also the size of the amount of people.
Sometimes I find the buildings more interesting
than the people I pass. The buildings have
history, purpose, secrets
inside their walls.
The buildings hold many
people, who hold their own secrets and lessons,
and this makes buildings so much more important.
The buildings are silent but say so much
with their splendor and enormity.
People around me though,
never are quiet. They talk-
on phones, to people,
to themselves. Do they think
that we can’t hear?
Or do they just not care?
Do they realize that in the moment I pass,
that their life has become entangled in mine,
if only for a moment.
I pass a street vendor,
who sells to those passing by.
He makes a living standing there
and it goes against everything I was taught
when I grew up learning
that you had to go to college,
to make a living.
But he paints every day,
because he loves it,
and uses it to survive.
And that thought is as abstract
as his paintings along the walk,
to my so formally structured brain.
It grows dark early now,
and I like the darkness much more
than the light that blinds.
But I realize with great sadness once again
that I can’t see the great
expanse of sky filled with little twinkles
like I can when I’m home.
And I miss the immensity of it.
They way that it made me feel small.
The way that it reminded me
that I’m a mere human
and nowhere near as grand as I wish.
