Street Thinker

Tell me.
What thoughts are these?
Endless circles like
your footprints through this town.
A philosophy of dots has strung you out
and convinced you of your own profundity,
because one or other of them touch on truth

that is irrefutable.

Your intonation speaks confident riddles

but your sentences are missing words,

so no one tries to argue against

your incomplete scraps of thought

claiming to be certainty too soon.

Yet in your rambles

you speak more sense than

money lovers and materialists

and the Christmas shoppers

who only ask real questions

when the stress of pointless gain

has almost killed them,

you speak more sense than the normal

in your mumbled chatter

from alcohol breath and

tired homeless mind.

Though like the normal

you have your indulgences,

you have your compromise

and you cannot live up

to your own principles

and you know it,

and, above all, you need the gospel.

Written in December 2011 after long philosophical conversations with one of the homeless guys at the shelter I work. He used the word 'genius' to describe himself, however his philosophy was a mish-mash of different sentences he must have picked up from here and there that got jumbled up in years of street drinking and rough sleeping. Yet even as incoherent as his thoughts are the poem tries to express how his life makes MORE SENSE than that of a non-thinking consumerist. Still he has need and compromise and above all needs the gospel. There is another poem coming that will attempt to explain the why of the last line, but that'll be some time in the future... Music was recorded in the last week.

http://soundcloud.com/peterlillypoetry/