When I was young, best thing I’d seen
was Morgan’s fort gone under green
in jungled Panama.
The only flags in forests there
were what leaf-cutting ants could bear:
for planet’s anima.
I touched skulls resting in plain view
in empty deserts in Peru:
mud walls stood rainlessly.
I sailed on seas beyond all land,
stood with a sloth, yes, hand in hand,
saw men drink sugared sea.
I learned to bodysurf in waves;
I climbed cliffs, and saw bats in caves,
saw beaches of pink sand.
Result? I always loved to roam
but nowhere lets me call it home,
All lands are not my land.
Some places I’m a citizen
but never been a denizen;
with others, the reverse:
the places that I’ve lived in most
ignore me like an unseen ghost,
foreign, vague-skinned, perverse.
The wind has blown me since my birth,
my home is nowhere on the earth,
from place to place I roam.
My parentage determined that
my citizenship’s “Expatriate”…
so… everywhere is home.
*****
Not all my poems are autobiographical, even if first-person. This one is. It was published recently in the Amsterdam Quarterly (thanks, Bryan R. Monte!)
Form in Formless Times 