Yesterday

In my city of no names,

Amidst a heap of hope:

A wall of bricks,

A nail and a hammer...

Age grows like hyacinths,

Eutrophicated and drugged.

 

Time escapes me

Like unruly cigarette smoke

Fresh from the winter,

The same way,

Sixty summers ago,

I fled the wild daffodils

And my unheard flock of sheep.

 

Into the night,

And many that followed

Their eyes must have scoured,

For me to come out

From amidst the sheep now returning by themselves.

From the hills brazen with darkness

A shot went off the beam:

A scream and a silence.

My skin, now coarse and pierced,

Turns sandpaper like

On every thought of truth, 

I charm myself to not believe.

 

The world passes by my rat hole,

Half a century of light,

and hiding That now makes me fear freedom,

And dream of gallows,

Half a century old. 

 

I am not going to let them know,

I was here, or there, that day.

Please tell them I killed no bird,

And that I killed no man,

I just lay there,

Listening to my daffodils,

Mourn for a shot gone wrong.