I Travel
Chacewater garden centre,
plants its mark on
visitors,
who are mostly old.
Sipping tea, chewing
scones
of gritty currants, dollop
of cream,
jam – cherry, maybe
more likely raspberry,
excavated from the
wholesale tin.
Spit seeds from gapped
teeth
where they lodge like
squatters,
dab tissues on dribbles
like blotters.
Some have a partner
oppositting,
perhaps there’s a little
talking –
sometimes silence because
they say
when you know somebody so
well,
conversation gets in the
way.
My septuagenarian neighbour,
Kevin,
clatters metal buckets of
weeds,
uprooting daily those
unpleasing
thickets of intruders
seeding
on his four square bit of
green.
From my window his
constant noise
is sometimes ignored,
and sometimes annoys –
often inoffensive, but
makes me think
of other plots, days gone
down
where we’re younger - it
stinks
to have me around, he
thinks
and he longs for the days
I travel.
But here’s where it ends,
bent backs, pots and
pails.
Today, I’m on Artemis, out
sailing,
tacking across Carrick
Roads,
maybe St Mawes, who knows?
Depends on where the winds
will blow,
I’m ten years behind him,
in no hurry to rattle my
tin
but know, in my heart,
it’s coming.
Maybe, nations are only people
–
they want to travel too,
their views may be
strange,
but they’re views all the
same
and we’ll mistrust our
sight
as they mistrust your
right
to photograph, border and
contain.
Within our minds,
travels each and every state
to be explored with rusty
thought,
and
destination is only
what a living life has
brought.
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