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Looking Back With the Handbrake Off
The world does not look now
like a place that I once belonged to.
Opening an atlas
the maps looks like nowhere I have ever been.
I pass through different windows now,
white rabbits lead the way.
Being older than I once was,
almost inevitably places have changed,
yet where I was born
looks like an alien city to me,
it seems like
a tourist destination for indigenous exiles.
The world was much larger when I was a traveler.
Chunks of the planet were only known
to explorers and scientists.
People were dangerous yet much kinder.
Now here in a corner of no-place-much
blancmange faces float in and out
speaking a language that means less to me
the more I hear it.
We once carried books around,
we loaded cars and pushbikes with travel books
and the poetry of adventurers.
We were old enough to be dreamers.
Of course the young were always dumb,
and the smarter they got the dumber they got.
Forgive me, the old have always talked like this,
our handbrakes are looser,
thoughts slip backwards downhill.
Yet we must speak occasionally
about the blancmange and the puerile,
the cheapening of what was once hard won.
I know I abide somewhere among this new world.
Brave or timid I abide half-hidden.
The land I inhabit now
has given me a passport, and I have an address.
I recognize once who I was and where
I lost maps I had once crossed.
Maybe I am too young at the moment
to forget or see where I should be.
Copyright ©
Eric Ashford
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