Not that they need the encouragement

Anyone who rides the NY subway will have noticed some cars have poems from the Poetry in Motion series, sponsored by Barnes and Noble and the Poetry Society of America. I have no idea what PSA is, but I assume they suck from the public teat, and spit the milk into the mouths of people like Caroline Gluck. So I hate them. Poetry in Motion, surprisingly, leans more toward conventionally good Thomas Hardy or Robert Frost poems, not Gluck. But the whole project is a bit strange. I suppose the bluestockings at PSA figured crushed straphangers could use some 'art' to perk up their dreary lives as they commute to soul-sucking jobs or are just on their way to the OTB to blow through their disability checks.

But today, I noticed this month's poem was Walt Whitman's, 'To You":

"STRANGER, if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me,
why should you not speak to me?
And why should not I speak to you?"


Unless you're a free-wheeling poet-homosexual or someone who never takes the train but imagines, as with a kindergarten, it's good in principle for strangers to talk to each other, this is a bad idea. The next creep who gives me 'bugger-eyes', or asks me where I got my jacket, I blame on you, PSA bluestocking.