The poet gives himself permission to write a light poem, imagining what kind of city he would create if he had the power. The photo is the first image that came up for South Street in Philadelphia, which has a history of managing to maintain its livable, likable character through waves of development, albeit it does have a Whole Foods market that looks like it was lowered from a helicopter.

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I'd build myself a city
A big, quiet town,
A city to call my own
With an uptown and no down.

Peopled by people
Who don't live in their heads,
No one lives too high;
All with homes and beds.

It'll be low tech,
Nothing quite on time.
Lots of coffee breaks
No crime.

Build myself a city,
Brick and cobblestones
Many races, many cultures
No cameras, no drones.

Dogs all walked,
Happy and quiet.
Bakeries on every corner,
Treats for every diet.

Clean and really nice,
Parks full of birds.
I'll figure it all it out
Street musicians handing out words.

Lots of coffee shops,
Nooks for the poet.
Food for thought?
Someone will grow it.

Subways for the underworld,
Skyways for highways.
Wherever you need to go,
Your-ways and my-ways.

No psychopaths, but empaths
Will find a welcome there.
There will be squirrels
Flying through the air.

And best of all
It will all fit neatly
Into my pocket,
Unless you ask sweetly.

I will lock it away
Keep it safe from hate
No guns, no attitudes;
Drop your guard at the gate.

Yes, I'd build myself a city,
A big quiet town,
A city to call my own
With an uptown and no down.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.