Memoirs for Portugal
In the drying drift of Aeroflot
tail lights, I let the skycap
hum drown out a clock’s chime,
overwhelm the intrusive wavering
of even-handed consideration,
of clustered-up pricing structures,
That kind to scarcely touch asphalt,
runway pylon before scattershot shatter.
But you’re not an observation,
a phenomenon of glitter & gunsmoke,
radiance of sunshowers, or
any other soft- spun metaphor
for 20-something passion’s naively
interlocked dreamtime escape. Then,
What was I pausing upon? Rapture’s dawn?
Not, but same sort, just thinking.
If You Find Yourself Lonely
When people build battlements of themselves,
brick-by-brick greying stiffness,
flying up as meadow larking,
they dress it up in splendid shades
to distract.
I wasn’t so locked-away as all that,
though reserved of harpsicord tune,
hesitant of Scotian spirits,
but I hadn’t the heart to lie,
nor protest.
Still, if the strains of NYC Philharmonic
ever sound of scraping scrap tin,
and the hanging soot of Dylan’s memory
in Greenwich becomes a coughing fit trap:
do say.
And if shop front lights in London
ever turn a shade too sour,
the cuckoo clock ding-dongs of alighting
bend a clanged note of North Star’s guidance:
it’s alright.
You were stronger than to feel it,
always.
Ashen Lights
That made sense, once;
it did in the way it only does
at 21, 22, 33, ignorant
of ways you sweat, hand-flutter,
stumble about paper sheaves,
of photocopier chiming, blurry
facsimile sort of love.
It makes sense, as you stare
blank into lunchroom crosswords of
B&W film star honorifics,
afar with Acropolis
dreaming, afar from madding crowds,
fluorescent dusty department
shades, reading lamps.
It makes sense if you see
same across forsaken
Mayflower muck, or did in
wilder time, afar from
meeting close in train platform tic-tocks
for the recent-minded, the
wrecking crew sentiment.
But it never does next noon,
never does at stumbling dinner,
never does in type-delete-type,
never does in that bent, sickly light
only bureaucrat barracks
ever have.