Try, if you could
to imagine—the chaos
certain
to befall any big-
shouldered city—if ever
such hordes
of frail would-
be poets—as never before
appeared in their numbers—
each distractedly
nosing-about,
unique and completely
independently—through the swamped
and complex
hoary networks—through jammed-
up and damp
flumes of old streets on a
bleary and crumbling
bleak, rainy Thursday, say;
and each looking only
for a certain rare
strain
or two, maybe—of exclusive-
ly personal
artistic freedom—
all at once actually saw what they needed to
out there
in the unspeakably
workaday fog—