Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Mind the Gap


I feel at home in London,
even though strangers stop and ask me
if I’m lost.
Yes, I am lost.
Do I take the sandwich from the cooler
and go up to the register?
Am I supposed to sit down first?
Do I need to leave a tip?
I am lost,
but no more than usual.
I am comfortable in the narrow streets
whose names change every few blocks or so.
I want to see the things I haven’t seen before,
but I also want to see all the things I love again.
I want to sniff every rose in Regent’s Park,
throw darts with a pint of golden cider in my hand,
missing the board by a mile.
Waiting in a Tube station
for a train that’s two minutes away,
reading the theater posters over and over.
I want to cross Abbey Road again,
find where I used to live on Sutherland Avenue
the building of flats with the bright blue door.
I don’t even really need to do anything
to be honest,
just be there
and live there like anyone else.
I won’t attract as much attention
as I did when I was 19
with golden hair falling down my black
and a small black dress and painful black heels,
but I’d be happy to watch
the boys and the girls
bantering confidently outside clubs
in Leicester Square
on a warm summer night.


1 comment:

  1. The prompt for this poem was "Write about a place you'd like to visit." I know London has been my muse in the past, and I may borrowed some phrases from previous poems. But I figure that if Trent Reznor can recycle lyrics ("Nothing can stop me now!"), so can I.

    ReplyDelete