Around the World in Eighteen Ways
Arabs fan fainted me, dehydrated in Aden.
In Tahiti I fall ill, bronchitis amid humid splendour.
At a summer camp in Dutchess County I get the sack.
Cops warn me for hitch-hiking after sundown in Maine.
In the wintry Cotswolds I wheeze in a bedewed attic.
A lost aunt is found in Liverpool post-Toxteth.
I cycle The Orkneys crabwise in North Atlantic gusts.
Ireland’s west coast lays me low with gastric misery.
Norway’s Customs suspect me of being drug cunning.
East German guards check for smuggled children.
Strasbourg hustlers flog me a carved vase that leaks.
Blackfly bitten bloodsucked, I itch The Cabot Trail.
On Newfoundland my backpack tips me backward in a bog.
Quick wits save me from a crazy in Thunder Bay.
Sailing The Inside Passage I awaken soaked on deck.
On the MI I leave lifeline money in a telephone box.
Bronchial again, in Barcelona, Las Ramblas torpor.
A drunken South African punches me on a plane.
My years approaching roads’ end, I savour souvenirs.
Again? Where do we queue for the Time Machine?
Incident Remembered
We try to catch up, inch ahead of the bills
working for low pay, me by day, her, evenings.
Kids abed, I smoke, watch TV, the clock, do crosswords.
There is no romance in the blur of such marriages.
We had paid a deposit, moved to a house in the sticks,
pinprick of light to former teenage sweethearts
who had sheltered in shadowy rooms behind a butcher’s.
Black midnight. Brakes squeal in our rutted driveway.
Under the porch light, alarmed by her frantic horn,
I gape, she scrambles from the car, voice trembling.
Another car stops outside, village quiet shattered.
This was when I knew no loss, phones had cords,
when a bully she cut off hammered on her tail.
Road rage, women as victims, news now. Echoes.
I was a hothead, still can be guilty of this.
My fury drives the moron off, my smarts, too few,
note the licence plate for police who track him,
tell us he must touch or threaten to be charged
but is in big trouble now with his wife, as I was
years after sticking together when we fell apart,
the only excitement in life the dangerous kind.
This Other Life
The what if alternative to chronic gothic memories
whistling around my mind so late now,
a life in which my parents value art’s integrity,
understand love’s kindnesses, children’s fragility,
where education is sanctified in lieu of lucre,
that is the current fantasy owning my insomnia.
Mapped undergraduate days begin in my teens
reading poetry, crashing in and out of love,
studying dreamily on campus, eschewing student jobs.
Qualified, I start real work in my mid-twenties,
enjoy lunch I can afford at a redolent hip deli,
leave my desk at day’s end, hands clean, satisfied.
Marriage to a woman who treasures books delights
despite autumnal affairs, because we take time
to touch each other, ‘sorry’s power stitched to last,
witnessed lessons of quality sustaining long-term.
Her people friends whose approval I value,
love our crumbling inner-city street, its old elms.
Wounded but little, at least until older,
I do not convey hurt, either to body or soul.
Suffering wrongs never eclipses me in moments alone,
betrayal’s burns resulting from minor exchanges only.
Friendship vanquishes seclusion, beauty is all.
Wrong moves? Few and trivial in this wishful life.
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Antipodes, Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Prole, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two-Thirds North. His seventh book iswonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.
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