Simon Perlsweig
Without a great deal of difficulty, it is safe to surmise that most people in this world have on at least one occasion engaged in the timeless and noble art of people watching. Whether it be at the airport during a long layover, in a restaurant while waiting for that overdue meal to show up, in a classroom while your classmates and instructor file in after you’ve been there already for at least ten minutes or somewhere else, it’s moments like these that little thoughts begin to float across your mind. These are the thoughts that you would love to write down, but don’t always have the means or the desire to do so and then later on wish you had. Another characteristic of these thoughts, is that many of them present themselves in verbiage that would be too awkward to say over in conversation, but would lend themselves well to pen and paper. In many ways that is how this book began, is by watching people while waiting for something and then jotting them down before they were lost. In many cases these thoughts had nothing to do with the people who I saw or what they were doing, they were just little ideas that chose to present themselves during a day’s dull moments. These dull moments also included moments of writer’s block which came up periodically while working my first book, Front Porches to Front Lines, and were used as a way to get the creative juices for that project going again. For some reason, by switching to another, lighter genre of writing, that helped get the thoughts going again for what was a more involved and intense project. Hopefully these little poems will give you some amusement while also engaging your mind on certain topics in ways that had previously been unconsidered.
