On a Sunday in Spring when it’s snowing pear blossom in the Hudson Valley

I am home with the wanderer’s blues, so I abandon the silver screen

for the grey streets, step into the cinema-rain of Stockbridge

reaching its treasury of charity shops and hungry volunteers.  

I greet the women behind counters who stare too long at things,

cause queues as they complement selection and tell you about their gardens.

 

 

 

These morning walks to school load with the same perpetual trigger of shutters opening 

a spontaneous spill of polystyrene bags and staleness,

the grocer next door wheeling out last week's fruit,

cars share petroleum kisses, sickly mint gum-stuck under the bench

the sky now a surgeon's slide-show of unhealthy lungs.

 

 

The fraudulent smiles of midnight findings unhinged

as symmetrical as sliced apple pips delivered into doorways

fibreglass saints listening with their faces of seasides and seances hearing

'how can I still love when the big flowing river doesn't have two equal streams':

patience/tolerance/forgiveness- see the potential rather than the obstacle-

these are souvenirs from places you have never been, so fill your pockets.

 

 

I am bored with the old; the myth, its' archaic nonchalance and cold hands

instead, I want modernity in numbers, the intrigue of variety

a get-away, break-away to stow away this curse of rising damp.

So why do I keep searching and buying when I could so easily

wrap it all behind the uniform bondage of boxes and move on

to start again in an empty room stunned by its own inebriation of silence

and surrounded by an unfamiliar landscape that pulses.

 

 

I stand in nature, strip for both light and lichen, expose myself to the elements

tailor my mind to fit the vanishing point of the horizon

to leave all lovers trapped under the moon not viable for escape

we are all alone riding the fugal narrative of self on this twin-flame journey,

- a train discontinued from the tracks leaving scars on the skin

still not sated by its previous programme of experience.

 

 

I too need something else to believe in, somewhere else to grow,

because I am not satisfied with my bland acceptances -

I want to look at a city for the first time from the highest pinnacle:

taste a tropical fruit straight from its branch, or sample a cuisine I can't pronounce

I just want to keep my eyes open when I walk.

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I want the future exposed by a chemical bounty that is yet to be invented,

a moment when we all smiled despite grief sieved through tv screens and a crystal ball

I want more than resurrection, something Promethean but more bravado

a Neo-revolutionists' applauded wet-dream.

 

 

I want something less living-room arrangement,  

something gaudier and more exotic than tank police and typhoons

to stammer my senses and hold my heart hostage -

I want something that I have not quite captured

what most of us want, to circulate and migrate like blood

and to steer closer than an inch away from rapture.

 

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