Or,
Who am I?
Well, we did it again. 20X2 ver 3.5 went off great. Big Thanks go out to all who attended and all who helped out, we could never have dome it without you guys, and we love you all. Kevin and I have often said that the event is really about the people who speak, not about us, and we believe it more every time we do it.
Thing is, this time, it was a least a little about me. I was “Speaker number 1!”. For posterity, here’s a bit of what I had to say.
At City Lights, Monday Morning
a poem by Jeffrey Rider
Who am I?
I ask myself this as I
sit at a window
In what is, to me
A Holy Place.
I can feel tears inside my face.
As I sit at this small black table
Surrounded by books and shelves of books
A man in a blue shirt ascends
He does not disturb my search
My questioning.
A yellow strip of plastic
like police tape, flutters
It cares not who I am.
Now blue shirt crouches
near my thought.
He disturbs my search for self
but only briefly.
He is not offensive, just too close.
He retreats, and I ask again,
Who am I?
Like the Ghosts of the Gods
of this Holy Place,
Fluttering around my ears,
Capering in and out of
Thick yellow unevenly cut pages?
Do I aspire to
their divinity?
That was the goal.
but is it in me?
is it innate?
is it real?
Am I waiting for it to emerge
Or do I seek out who I am
by writing?
At times, I feel I have
given up
sold out
sold myself short.
But as I sit,
writing
warmed by the sun through
the window
of this Holy Place
Where I returned by train
by foot
by memory
by instinct
I read and write and ask
Who am I?
Why is my name Jeffrey,
or Jeff
or Jefe?
Why?
That’s why.