Poem’s Fear of Travel

The history’s there, layered
in arrivals, stonework, a global subject writing
ignorance as mastery and caught
in the traffic between difference.

He is mistaken, a mistranslation.
Random buses and a bad compass.

But this awareness is a release,
a pull-tab on a life-vest tossed at
36 000 ft into the library of
not knowing. Water shimmers below.

The foray takes many
litres of fuel, emissions a trail
over Greenland, the line
and imperial tracing of mobility
a second modernity, two
sunrises a doleful symbol, and
Poem lands, thankful for coffee.

The retrospect is writing—“I
should not have gone.” The earth convulses,
reinvents itself as quantum physics, a psychic
thrust of its own. Unowned. Not the coffee but
the coffee bean and
the dirt it is.

Development: the stuttered, halting end
to a fantastical harmony that never existed.

Please ensure your serving trays are
in an upright position and fasten
your poetics securely around your waist.