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