THE DEVIANT FANCY

Or
Something New

By Michael J Grady

(A love letter to the ones who made something anyway)

It almost didn’t happen.
It didn’t belong.
No one was asking for it,
And sometimes it didn’t seem worth it.
But to someone, for a little while, it was everything.

It was presented in coffee houses,
Played in garages on instruments rescued from consignment shops.
It was performed on street corners, in living rooms, on subway platforms.
Shot on Super 8, on videotape, with iPhones.
Written on napkins, over newsprint, on crumpled paper.
Spoken like a prayer, sent into the ether, dropped in a mailbox,
Handed to a friend of a friend of a friend.

And it was unknown.
Or was it ignored?
It was drowned out, pushed back, rejected.
Abandoned by promises, other plans, and good intentions.
And left to a terrible, heart-rending silence.

They tried not to think of the unredeemed tickets,
Or notice the unopened invitations.
As their scattered fliers blew around them,
They bravely faced the empty galleries,
And the halls of vacant seats.

They held back tears behind a dignified grin.
They hurried home to beat the coming flood.
And there, like failed prophets, they wept over the ruins.

And walked the Earth shamefaced,
While their unheeded message smoldered inside them.
It was their exposed heart.
Beating and vulnerable.

They became ashamed.
Reticent to admit their passion projects.
Their little failures.
The day job. The safe bet.
Unjustified, unconfirmed,
Without a witness — unredeemed.

They were forgotten.
“Was this an artifact of indulgence?
A monument of waste?”
Was the world testing them — or did it want them to fail?
Would one more push ruin them, or redeem them?

I cannot hear them, but I know they are there.
Hidden in silence, I sit among you.
We who wonder what it all was worth.

For you, I strain to give my best answer:

It’s the peasant’s dish served in the finest restaurants.
It’s the street singer’s song that turned Detroit into Motown.
The off-off-off Broadway show that moves uptown.
The independent film that changes cinema.
The book that creates a genre and defines a generation.
The college dropouts who built Silicon Valley in their parents’ garage.

Every game-changer, every turning point,
Was brought about by a freak on the fringe.
A heart willing to carry the weight of loneliness.

And every radical, new idea was once — by definition —
A fantasy in the mind of a deviant.