Travel & Transitioning

Three Poems

Gratitude

To think of gratitude and to think of thank you cards
instead, the small panic of them, the pressure
to buy the ones with black and white Parisian photograph
covers and the blank insides, ready for your profound message,
you writer, you beautiful liar; you are supposed to be good at this.

So you write, Thank you for the flowers. I don’t know
what to call them, but they are pink and I plan
on taking them to bed with me in your absence. You write,
Thank you for the reminder you’re eight hundred miles away.
You draw pictures of hot air balloons and trolley cars and
inaccurate maps of the United States with dash dashed arrow
routes that point from one stick person holding flowers
to another stick person empty handed.

And when it is too hard to be thankful for anything
other than the fact that at least the two of you aren’t dead yet,
you call, despite the time zone difference and impossible hour,
to say, Walk west so that I can hear your footsteps better.

Tinder

To the cowboy who taught me
to light matches with my teeth,

I say, look at this wind tonight. Look
at the way it snaps the tree trunks can
you teach me to light those? Can you
teach me to build a kite out of them? Something
to fly on from here to there something to measure
the distance of absence with? I say, look:
Velocity impetus alacrity flux. I say, look:
The intrinsic arrowing of our two mouths.

Civil War

I apologize for getting off on danger, but
I can’t tell you any more
about my transitory fantasies involving the two of us
being consumed by prairie fire, because remember
last time? when I said I wanted to take the bones
of your hands and make them into a heart shaped brooch
for my new tweed jacket?

You totally freaked out
and I was just being romantic.

And I’m sorry that
I spent most of last night trying
to crawl inside the spine of my atlas and
I’m also sorry for eskimo kissing the hell out of
the Mason-Dixon line, but globes make
impossible pillows. Pillows make
impossible pillows. I don’t know what to do any more
but ask you to sever and mail me a limb while
I work on memorizing the topography of too far away.

Travel & Transitioning

Two Poems

‘Maniar’

It’s the largest city square in Europe,
the guide book says.

We sit down.

Lurid posters
(mostly flame and shadow)
advertise a feature on
the Bali bombing.

You take the thermos out and,
as we choose pastries,
a beggar
approaches.

‘Maniar.
Maniar,’

he keeps on
saying.

He won’t
go away.

Our only
tea-bag
falls
to the ground.

Tourist and Beggars

Just inside a church in Würzburg
is a plate of coins and, further in,
an angry face
confronts potential
donors and thieves.

We’re aware of him as we walk around
and of a possible encounter
on leaving – which, luckily,
doesn’t happen.

Some beggars watch you right
from the start,
judging who might respond
and when to speak.

One I remember
wipes his eyes
as if it’s all too much.

Another squats
with his eyes closed,
the state of his mind
and body in doubt.

Those who don’t look
stay in the mind most,
particular one who lies
by his hat
foetus-like.

As a tourist who doesn’t give,
I notice elderly locals who do
and wonder about myself.

Travel & Transitioning

Two Poems

Cuba

Three things filled the abandoned room – dust, sunlight and the silence. I stood
below the blackened chandelier, hanging from the high ornate ceiling,
fearing the lead from paint specks peeling off the walls. In the adjoining
room I spied through the neglected doors a nude painting, a white bicycle,
tyres flat, and book shelves holding rows and rows of ancient volumes,

but the largest pile of rotting books lay in the room
I was in, on the rusting military metal
desk. Three moth-eaten armchairs must have once been host to
connoisseurs of philosophical conversation, sitting in front
of the torn painting depicting deer outnumbered
by hunting dogs. They must have had debates
about communism, the party and the state.

The floor tried to stay marble despite the bleaching benevolent sun.
I had the feeling I’d find liquor in the little black cabinet.

Reykjavik

Clocks had little reason to the strength of daylight.
I bounced on the mossy rocks as I waited outside a geothermal pool
for the bus piped with easy listening. Somehow the sulphur stench
matched the devilish sky. A nice dark-haired girl spoke good English
but turned out Finnish, an exchange student with a positive attitude.
She worked in a greenhouse and found the Icelandic tongue cunning.

The tiny town centre was deserted, the young ones were hungover
from the over-exertion of Saturday night, smashing absinthe bottles, the shards
gleaming blisters catching light from the sun too weak to relieve the cold
of its bitterness. It is on this kind of island, on the edge of the habitable,
where by next week you could be dead, that I felt most alive.

On the drive back to the airport along the black coastal highway,
I could sense the taxi driver, mumbling through his white rough beard,
just starting to warm up to his alien passenger.

Travel & Transitioning

Three Poems

Breakwater

if you remain in your car
all you can see
is the breakwater.
ragged chunks of concrete
pieces of rebar jutting out
like mummified fingers.

Lake Michigan lays there
a dead ocean
indistinguishable from
its mortuary slab.
smell the embalming fluid,
a noxious mixture
of detergent and petroleum
byproducts pumped in
by the refinery and
the surrounding mills.

after climbing the breakwater
and finding a smooth boulder
of concrete to perch on
I watch the February storm
approach from the northeast.
the sky and sea seem
to merge creating a
seamless shirt of the world.

ten years gone
and nothing really changes.
Chicago still glimmers to
the west;
the distillation towers
of Amoco refinery sulks
in the east.
and all I ever succeeded
in doing this last decade
was killing time.
I murdered ten years
so cleanly
I didn’t leave so much
as a witness.

Returning Home

I haven’t lived here for so long
the houses seem to have huddled
even closer together as though
comforting each other in my absence

I pass taverns
Cavalier Inn
What About Bob’s
Pudlo’s Tap

I know any bar I walk into
I’ll see someone I haven’t
seen in over ten years
and we’ll act like it’s great
to see each other again

where you been?
what you been up to?

we’ll subtly compare hairlines
and biceps and how many
beers necessitate a trip
to the bathroom and nothing
will have changed though we’ll
pretend everything has changed

Exits

the further you drive
the more obvious
the template becomes

every exit
like every other exit

McDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Taco Bell

Cracker Barrel or Steak & Shake
for the affluent traveler

Ramada Inn, Best Western, Econo Lodge

the Ocala, Florida exit no different
from the Demonbreun, Kentucky exit

it’s the Wal-Martyrization of America
diversity excised from the equation
for your traveling convenience
until the land itself possesses
the anonymity of a hotel room
negating the need to journey at all

 

Travel & Transitioning

Two Poems

A Travellers’ Guide to the East Indies

1.
To arrive anywhere tonight
you travel a road lit only by fireflies
to towns whose names mean
‘tomb of a hundred martyrs’.
Invisible birds sing tinkling vowels
– words from a time
before history invaded.

Frogs roar louder and louder
kickstarting a generator.
Trees, pagoda, the moon
a shaking world in lagoon waters.

Beware the regiments of the kangaroo!
Progress follows without emission controls.
Across, say, the Banda Sea or clouded mountain ranges
a world lost for ten thousand years
soon adjusts to ghetto-blasters and minibuses.

Western airliners overhead: missiles
that deliver foreign exchange.
Banyan trees grow sideways through the air.
Shouts and shrieks of barter and cash
amplify in a packed bazaar.

Crowds ebb and swell, laughing.
Trays of trinkets, batiks, sweets, fruit
and vegetables all laid out on grass mats.
Beggars harangue pointing at their children.

A legendary pickpocket, Dusk, splashes red over the sky.

2.
In Sumatran cities transvestites caterwaul
after visitors’ fair skin.
Bus races over cliffs are a diversion
most prefer to miss, likewise a tiger
loose in a longhouse
though if one wears the brass ring a shaman prescribes
a tiger’s friendship is assured.
Indeed you’ll be invited home to its lair
& there smoke pipes of jungle grass,
receive potent amulets as gifts.

Kalimantan monkeys and wildcats screech like brakes
before a crash. Honey bears and orangutans,
singing laments, carry giant lilies to hideaways
as all the forests are felled
so throwaway teak chopsticks
adorn Japanese bowls.

Whilst animist priests fill an earth station’s dish
with rice, square-rigged ships ply old spice routes.
On deck, gladly corrupted sailors swig arak
and drunk as baboons on durians their minds
swim off to the Roaring Forties.

Mid-West 1

Bathed in unlucky blood­
Bison land is stamped by a bitumen
Web enmeshing sacred ground,
State shields glint blue in the sun

So the free spirit changes gear
Fuel-injected, turbo charged,
Chants the sky’s tyre mantra:
Wrecked-Auto-Heaven
Smile on the State & Interstate
Give us frantic, highway joy
At 90 mph you’re sure, rip roar the night away.
Carburettors breathe the eagle’s country,
There’s no speed limit when oneness is reached
And highways meridian industry and peace.
Engines surge, melt mountain
At dawn the trains whistle like ghosts.

Travel & Transitioning

Two Poems

Sight-Seer

Haggling at Clarke Quay

I keep my humour,
the proprietor his –

jovial but firm.
The joke an antiquity,

punch-line a rumour.
The Quay plainly put:

bent at this juncture.
More aesthete than buyer

the argument’s won
in looking farther

afield. Or flattering
his smoking gun –

drawn from cloth,
dust jacket cracking:

“Singapore boobies,”
jaundiced early eighties

erotica. More aesthete
than buyer I ask after

Mao-ist propaganda.
Despotic kitsch, busts

and pins I should care
less about, nor humour.

He starts at twenty,
I work my way down

– jovial but firm –
something of my taste

for the “early eighties”
in Mao’s receding hair-line.

Karaoke (Babylon)

He’s not exactly speaking my language, eyeing
himself in the side-board mirror. Sticky rice
queen slumming it, not exactly singing – to me.

His face, the choreographed collective of the duo
on screen, signing its availability to already
established markets. Pre-pubescent mandarin

breaking into even more underdeveloped English:
ooh baby, baby. For all his grasp, its perfunction –
open the window. Ooh open the window, aah open

the window. Someone else’s standard in a bar filled
with mirrors, singletted, tank topped, body shirted like
so much peanut flesh encased in shell. He holds the mic

like a phallus, my gaze for like seconds and the room
choruses ad lib to fade: will any of us have a career
over thirty, will any of us have a career over thirty –