The Kid

David Henderson’s poem, “The Kid” really resonated with me, perhaps because of the setting. Being that I am from the Lower East Side, I’ve been to the places where Henderson takes us in his poem; St. Marks Place, The Hudson River, Avenue D and C, and 8th street. The poem speaks of a kid strolling along the Lower East Side on a Sunday, singing and drinking a bottle of wine. When suddenly he gets stopped by two police men who see his bottle. When they ask him where he lives or if he works, he replies by singing “ I ain’t got no money— and I ain’t got no job— I ain’t got a home— and I ain’t got one one to call my own” (15).  Perhaps it is because he is drunk that he replies like this, but it could also be because he simply doesn’t care that he has been stopped by the police. The lyrics to this song could mean something beyond just words. Since the kid wanders around , I think that “ I ain’t got no home” could mean that he is lost in this world, or that no one really has a permanent place in the world, because we are all just here temporarily. In addition, “ I ain’t got no one to call my own” could mean just that, that no one really belongs to some one else.

Similar to this poem, Henderson also mentions the use of liquor in other poems, like in “Good Joanne” Some of the locations are used in more than one poem as well.

Reading this poem out loud, I noticed that in certain stanzas, the words just sounded like a listing of things, but at the same time, song like. An article on Henderson by Terry Joseph, called the Dictionary of Literary Biography, states that he is “ The literary heir of Langston  Hughes”. It must be because his poems seem to be infused wit Jazz. The article says that Henderson sort of improvises in his poems. This is the same idea discussed in Blues People by Amiri Baraka, they way that negro captives would sing their songs—by improvisation. Improvisation offers more emotion because it’s saying whatever comes to mind.