The Library

Lapidary blue skies consumed the east and the west.
Skies of multiple universes,
mine being an eighty by one-hundred twenty-two plot.

A man walks by, reluctant steps
minding the trees
and the breeze
wishing ne'er the exercise.

I should expect my own
Beleaguered reluctance Would reach my soul
Only some years, and maybe even minutes
behind his.

I remember days when rooms full of luggers,
sheltered midwestern men,
hunkered round' and mocked.

As burlesque players might,
fomented foreign accents, New Englander's mostly,
because theirs was about the only accent
reasonably slander worthy,
those labored with hazy endings and round vowels.

"You won't get faa with that caa paaked in the yaad..."

No harm intended beyond guileless luggers, a table and some beer.

While others in malted colonial street bars of New England
hoodwinked stereotypically "those hicks" somewhere
on the crusted shoulders of I-Oh-Way.

No harm intended beyond ingenuous aquiline eyes,
some beer and a table.

Conversations somehow gave them ownership,
membership of some place,
consistent and yet continuously improvised,
There-in lay the bedrock of invention.

Simply, men closer to their independence
than most.

And Schlitz was the norm,
and a glass-full of bud wasn't more or less filling,
and that was fine.

My need for independence festers
and pours out of me like a wound.
I simply long to sit in still life
and carve shapes into the clouds.

I long for the wisp of a benevolent approver.

I found and tended the Geographer's Library,
and discovered the Cartographer's secret,

That all roads eventually lead to the want of home.

One can tell by some dark smiles
what is of joy and thankfulness
that only the honesty of experience
can bare.

And so it is with multiple universes
That some I have seen
leaves so much past.

It strikes me to think of
who deserve the nurtured
cigarette twixt the first two fingers,

Even the dying plant of summer
and the dry leaves of autumn
borne and died most for those who
dare to listen to them fall.

Lapidary skies
and dust like helium rise
in my wake
like a crematory and a dead man's bowl.

I found life in the Geographer's Library.
I flew in lapidary skies,
more free and joyful  than the reigns
of most men,
and contrails of spit, sweat and tears,
and tongue wagging happiness.

"I am trailed by so much history,"
said the geographer.
Far unlike the pendulum
and greater than the scale
The past far outweighs the present,
and only one second should be my future.

And there it is, my cartographer's rendering,
heavy.
Hindsight is not twenty-twenty,
but the map doesn't lie.

Withal I stand
on nothing more than now,
on feeble legs
in my plot,
in my feathered present,

And I breath free air
and raise my hands,
flaming cigarette twixt
my deserving fingers
and I dance,

Somewhere within the Geographer's Library.