Travel Advisory

 

In Denver, poems stay up in the Rockies at night

only rolling down Colfax Avenue in bright afternoon,

hanging out in the vanished record store with

Allen Ginsburg, waiting for night to howl at the moon.

In Toronto, you can catch a touristy rickshaw

or hustle some change at night on Yonge street

depending where on the grayscale you fall,

and the poems there wear boots and are desperate/sweet.

In Manila you can take your poem to a fine hotel

or share Italian in a restaurant where they let you write on the wall,

then get starry/holy at one of the cathedrals

and set out before dawn to hunt up some warm pan de sal.

But in London there are no poems, they've all

fallen into the gap, been run over by trains,

gotten rat-tired of curry and black-coat robots.

Nerves fried, orphan-empty, they sick in the streets, 

cut out their tongues, and die whenever it rains.

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for Word Garden Word List--Iron Horse

Music: Leo Kottke Eight Miles High