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Advice: A Book of Poems

Chapter 2: ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT
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About This Book

A series of short lyric pieces speaks directly to plants, animals, objects, streets and people, offering counsel, observation and ironic tenderness through apostrophic address. Urban and industrial vignettes sit beside pastoral and fable-like poems, with occasional dialogues and parable structures that alternate between sardonic humor and elegiac calm. Recurrent contrasts between motion and stillness highlight scenes of labor, performance and fleeting beauty, while a personal, conversational tone links meditative portraits and sharp urban sketches to broader reflections on perception, loss and small, uncanny moments.

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT

Lacerated grey has bitten
Into your shapeless humility.
Little episodes of roving
Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness.
Life has given you heavy stains
Like an ointment growing stale.
Endless feet tap over you
With a maniac insistence.
O unresisting street-pavement,
Keep your passive insolence
At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet.
Only one who lies upon his back
Can disregard the stars.