I’m out of luck again
And out of inspiration,
And Lenin is on his train
To the Finland station.
He knows what he’s doing
He knows what’s to be done,
And here I am still
Standing on the platform.
*
I feel the lure
Of the suburbs calling,
To be simple to be wise
A bartender - pretender
Living out his life
Without a hope or a prayer,
Season by season,
Here now invincibly
Without rhyme or reason.
But the rhyme and reason
Keep the locomotives coming.
And the need to arrive somewhere
Goes ahead of everything
The young poet
Walking out
Into the Finnish lake,
Another in the mental asylum
Too early far too late,
One I admired counting out
His final days in cigarettes.
And my mentor buried alive each night
Recalling it all in the morning…
And then it hits me like a train:
If everyone heads nowhere
Why am I so jealous?
What is the hurry to win?
Life is not a race across a field
Or a script being written by God,
There is no rhyme or reason
But the luggage you bring
When the train has already
Pulled out of the station.
*
It doesn’t end;
The light-bulbs to be changed. Bed mites
In my pillow. Tides milling the shore.
They never end.
Car hire lease payments.
The fatuousness of fame. Replication of
Cancer cells. The best dying young:
The worst getting their own
Newspaper columns. Summer nights heavy
With the smell of bad barbecues:
Autumn with diesel, spring with cocaine.
It never ends. Idiots in the chancellery. Control freaks
In their driving seats. The plunder of the forests.
The selfishness of plankton. Suspicious border guards.
The questions and evasions.
Insects thriving. Continents colliding.
Mothers screaming at their kids.
Lovers arguing in the streets….
They will never end.
But this
At least
Is finished.
In Memoriam Tony Judt 2009