Travelers' Guide / Coming Home
Dateline: 9/30/98Tis the season to be away. Anywhere. And to come home. Anywhere. And when yr Poetry Guide Margery took off for her last trip to any everywhere, she landed on the tube in ol' London Town, just to see how far she hadn't moved.
Poetry can bring us together; a poem that allows us inside as we move, mutually, towards a center called love is rare indeed. Come, Love, travel with me to you, the Other, dear Reader, fellow traveler, Poet. Poets all.
Heathrow to Russell Square
Jet lag drapes gauze before my face
But still I can perceive
These are scary people on the tube
Wire-legged bike courier could-be
On black rubber platform boots
Cartoon high as ever I’ve seen
He’s got rings in every orifice
Green spikes woven into his
Crazy Mohawk topknot
So up-to-date he wears plastic
Orange cellophane across his ribs
(How strange, I can see his ribs through too-pale skin. . . )
His aura is shy or suspicious
Of the suited, tied, coated, briefcased
Traders seated all around him
But when my eyes wander up to his
I meet an intelligent being
And am no longer afraid, of him
“All done up like a dog’s dinner,”
Our English friend’s father would say
But he’s not nearly as scary as the other
Nearly albino, incredibly white young man
Flushed and sweaty and angry
Stepped onto the car muttering “shite”
More frightening as I notice each new detail
How he mumbles to himself as the car
Passes from sunlight into the black of a tunnel
And back into hot yellow, how his eyes
Jerk from side to side, glancing off
The people onto their belongings
How his steel-toed black boots are cracked
Where his toes bend (from how many
Frantic jump-starts, running away?)
How his cheap vinyl bag is empty
(For carrying what he steals?)
How his hair is stringy and desperate
The air around him is volatile
I am convinced he is both victim
And predator, will instantly explode
“Englan’ is a bitch,” sings Linton
Kwesi Johnson, for Jamaicans,
Pakistanis, Scots and Brits
“Englan’ is a bitch,” but so is any city
And though I’ve flown nine hours
I’m still in the same place
Clacking down this railway track
Public transit’s jumble
Of local desires and hatreds
All cities are the same, I see
And even this most monstrously
Miserable young man
Is not nearly as fearsome
As the striving herd from whom
He snatches whatever he can reach
Hanging from every ceiling loop
They wear the same woolen suits
Expensive watches, good shoes
The women stockings, heels, nail lacquer
All their bags are leather
All their accents foreign or posh
They are strivers, builders
Of the new British consumer society
There are others like them
All over the world, wherever
Money is to be made, wherever
Capital and trade revere themselves
They are the scariest of all
And they are the reason
Every city is the same.
--Margery Snyder
This poem first appeared in Lynx Eye, Summer 1998, Vol. V, No. 3.
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