The natural street-musician will follow you once
you have dropped a coin into the hat. Because
the cloying mountain of minds

presses in, because of frailty.
Because the airy mind is frail. The street-musician
says, "Examine your pride,
examine yourself—I am not the government."

You say, "To my mind, I have not gone enough 
to concerts, to enough bars to enough
of those corners necessary to shake
the follow and the following."

"The mind and the air
need each other," he counters,
"as governance slides from stone
to brick. Look outside—idylls and fanfares

have blended into a bath-warm middle—you
are being followed and, I suspect, learning
about how the mind of an entertainer
functions. That that hive
is no government of stone."