Traveller
I love travel because there is that moment
where someone alive greets you bright-eyed
and smiling with a firm handshake between
the minarets and the grill smoke and the hip, black-clad
laughing youths drinking their coffees after work
and says, “New York, right?”
with a warmth and a shine in the fresh of their eye
where you’re no longer the austerity of your working-class roots
no longer the small-town kid pulling his hoody
around his pale face like armour and
staring at the tarmac that seems to go on forever
no longer the weirdo at school who never fit
but something new, something magic.
And I answer, “England, Manchester,”
which is just as interesting,
and suddenly I feel the brown brogue leather on my boots shine
like my growing steps were down Fifth Avenue,
and I am proud — not for wealth or country — but for another richness,
and my crossed legs and posture lift my shoulders
like I am a prince of life,
and my dimples turn upwards like bowls full of silver,
and the smiling strangers in front of me,
and passing in the street,
and laughing at the tables, are a friend
waiting to entwine in the song of our fertile lives.
What is my life except a collection of stories?
This one that binds me,
this one that allows me to unfurl
and be something I never yet always was,
and which one is really more me if I look close —
the drudgery, the bully’s wayward word,
the ancestors’ hands forced to forget,
or the magic of our birth?
I love travel because I see through the bars in these moments,
the blinkers of that small child who was taught he was a tumbleweed,
an old plastic ball, a nothing, a dysfunction,
I see through these stories I have given my life to,
see them lift like a transient fog,
into how the world, how I, how life
could be if a new one was allowed to begin —
into freedom.