I.
Of course, the pavement is embossed with stars—
curious of their own existence, forged,
unable to form constellations.
Time is abstract. Poetry flickers
like passing headlights,
Morse code from a past life
sending signals into the ether.
For a moment, I caught myself dancing.
The night comes on slow
through hazed, incessant summer days.
Tumbling through a shaft of light,
in rhythmic off-beats,
afrobeat dancehall trips carry us
through London plane, silver birch,
black poplar, royal oak, and groan.
II.
I’ve never caught a blackened fish.
The shelves I built droop
under feathered pressure.
Changing oil was never my skill.
Give me a shirt to iron
and I end up crumpled.
I am a man of the least means possible—
but give me the night,
I will always find you,
leading darkness to stickied oxblood leather,
haircut denim, bell-bottomed sway,
new line order.
In those London days I stitched
fabrics of ill-informed decisions
beneath my star-mottled skin.
III.
One hungover morning, we awoke
to jet engines carving across towers,
people running, dust crumbling.
We sat frozen in amber—
Rose, my schoolteacher girlfriend in Queens,
half-crazed, half-distant, nails clinging
to the dull hum of gods choking on ash,
mouthing spells to broken satellites,
watching babies’ fingers drifting
down grated drains,
the city swallowing maddening screams.
The lines dead. No signal.
Later that year, we reunited.
I exchanged letters with her students.
There’s one I’ll never forget—
a simple question:
Do bad things happen in your country
like they do in the
United States of America?
This is brilliant !! London is my home but I wasn’t born yet in that year, interesting to read about its beauty before