Metamorphoses (1...N)

​Another three years of life distilled into 35 poems from a dozen cities and all the cracks between them.​​

One

I’ll wear your scent like perfume

Around my neck and hands

If our bodies survive the night 

And are separable by morning 

And do not become one.

If we don’t wake up

A single being

Under the blanket –

Lonely again. 

Nomadism 

I live in no city

And there are a hundred bakeries

I can call my own,

Where the owners would recognize me

And invariably say:

Hey, you’ve been away for a while. 

The Baltic

I bought my tickets

Just to get some sleep

In airport lounges,

Not for the skies

And smiles of tired ladies

With golden hair

But somehow,

Following the signs

And clues

And little games 

Of laptops-liquids-out,

I found myself

Again above the waters

And now watch

The little islands

Pass me by.

Above Latvia

The coast below me:

White eyeliner of sand,

Slow, shallow waves,

Pines in a shabby carpet,

Bald with fields

And specks of villages, 

Patched up with cities,

Scratched with roads, 

Coming and going. 

A flat expanse of land

Under a high-speed sky

Roamed by the bored clouds

of the Baltic

And my Boeings.

Taking off again

If I ever die

When taking off again

I want to be thinking

About the forest

And not a handbag. 

33

Waiter, I asked for a beard 

With no salt and pepper! 

But I guess it will have to do. 

Can’t be too picky

With what they serve

In bathroom mirrors. 

Finland

The islands in these lakes

Remind me of the side 

Of a spotted cow,

Dark with trees

On the even waters,

Stretching onward

And onward,

As my flight takes wing. 

Timezones

Go, let yourself be tired –

It’s midnight somewhere after all. 

Now, could it also be

That somewhere’s Sunday?

5:20 (more time zones)

I hit the “Send” key 

At around five-twenty

On a Monday morning

In the city where y’all live.

And all I say in my defence

Is this:

Good fucking morning!

Leprechaun 

It took my beard

Six solid months

Before the ginger started showing. 

How many more 

Before my eyes

Turn green?

East of Yonge

I watch the condo

Towering where

Stood that little house

Where I taught people

How to dance ten years ago. 

Where hobos now make space

For builders having lunch,

Re-lacing heavy boots

Before they beat it –

And organic coffee shops

Kill off the last of seedy bars

And drive away the crazies 

Somewhere we can’t see them,

While the builders' boots

March on

Towards another intersection.

Chiyoda-ku

I spent five days

In the eyes of Mount Fuji

And saw it but once

The mists of Tokyo. 

Finland II

I’m back

I’m back

The little islands

Deadlines

I’d like to wake up

Live a day

And fall asleep

Without a clock

Ticking down my spine

Memory 

Yesterday’s sex

Without a shower since

Smells like dead fish.

Why?

It was so good. 

Women

The blondes are a lie,

As are most women in general:

They just don't exist

The way you imagine them,

How you'd want them to be;

The next one will never be better

Than the one who's already

The one.

These sun-flooded lands

7 AM. My air conditioner

Begins its losing battle

With the heat of day. 

It will not win, but for the moment

It is very cold. 

I accidentally wake up my wife by clanking

My wedding ring against my phone

When typing these new lines. 

Good morning, Vietnam.

Weight of a different decade

I wonder if the moment’s here

When I won’t shake that extra kilo

Back to where it started in one week.

Oh, scales and mirrors –

Who’d have thought 

How far we are from fortune tellers

And from dragons

In this bathroom. 

GH

12:30. Little buses

Ferry service workers

Back into the night

As their replacements

Yawn on uniforms.

They are not smiling

And the apples in the hallway

Know.

Meanwhile (This too shall pass)

Think of the ballerinas

Performing on painkillers

Numbing half-broken joints

Emirates

I look around the lounge

And I'm some 35 years early

For business class.

Or 50, for a white guy.

Lagging behind

I walk the undeserved broad daylight

While my internal clock strikes midnight

And my soul is lost between the phantom cities

I am in — and not.

Oh what I wouldn't give for but a little sip of sleep:

To close my eyes on-board a westbound train

And go wherever darkness takes you.

Verses From The Sands

1/ Long purple shadows

Color car tracks in the desert

Me and my buggy

2/ The sun is no more

White smoke of sand

In my headlights

Like snow in my path

Glorious desert

3/ I finish a yoga practice

Just as a sandstorm

Erases the last bits of view

From my window.

Loyalty

I'm collecting stamps

On the loyalty card

Of a coffee shop

Near my son's school

As if I belonged here

As if I am not gone again

In four days.

Half-Life

I remember those summer nights

When the sprinklers would come on

As I sat playing Half-Life

On your balcony

And our son was already inside you

And I knew it

And did not know what to do.

Now he's nine

And things seem to have settled.

L’Orangerie

I’m always somewhere

Just beneath the surface

Of his lily pond, in Giverny. 

I come whene’er I lose myself,

And dive, and lose myself again –

And find me. 

Peace upon the land

It's morning in Switzerland 

And my wife smells of coconut oil

And green tea.

We're about to go down 

For quiche and a coffee

Before I set off for work.

I'm wearing a sand-colored shirt

And my notebook is green.

Five hundred years without war

Are worth many wrongdoings.

2012

I remember the wild, wet,

Leathery skin of strippers,

Their hair full of smoke.

Just how lonely

Were you supposed to be?

Mirror images

I travel their cities at peace.

And think how they cowered

Through bombing raids

In the dark of the tube.

Or went down to the river

With icy cold buckets.

Cologne

You hated my Kenzo

But I kept on using it,

And our son will be ten

Next year.

Now he has crossed the ocean

To see me – all by himself,

An unaccompanied minor.

Midnight Eye

I shut out everything

And look out of my

Midnight eye.

Over the moonlit hills

Instead of this

O'ercrowded place.

Recycled Pathway

I came all this way

To catch a plastic bag

In the wind

And stuff it in a trash can.

ShZd Rd

I live above an intersection 

And spend my mornings 

Watching traffic waters flow

Below my balcony on 47. 

Rivers can take many forms –

And this is one of them. 

Lentil Stanzas

1/ A girl is waiting for someone

To pick her up at the roundabout.

Her knees bend slightly backwards

Her skirt doesn't reach the beach bag

Hanging from her shoulder;

Slim and tan at the curb.

Meanwhile, my lentil soup is coming

But her taxi gets there faster:

A gentle door clack –

And she's gone.

2/ The mosque is silent.

It's too dark to read.

I should be working,

But my working bones

Have snapped.

A beached umbrella.

Disemboweled jellies.

Sand in a builder's boot print.

It is not the first time

That I feel this way

This year.

3/ There comes the soup.

Metamorphosis N

I turned to sand on a morning 

That did not seem auspicious in any way. 

Lazing in one chair and then another,

Bothered by nothing

But that tingling around the tongue

Like when mangoes could’ve been riper,

I permitted myself to whisper onto the floor

In five silvery streams of an hourglass:

Fully clothed man one moment,

pile of sandbags – the next;

A perplexing sensation of ease.

Look for me under your floorboards. 

Try not to sneeze.