Stockholm Syndrome

I’d often seen the runway kissed by refugees

and bought-out hostages, an odd drunk and those

renouncing the flying for good, and thought

that surely there must be worse places to touch

freedom. Between the tailfins and the gray town

in the distance, gravity cropped up only at a newsstand,

and fizzled out with the first bite of the octane damp,

the view of the parking bunkers and stacked hovels

by the motorway. Everything else, before and after,

could have fitted into half a cigarette, the sickly sunshine

and endless nights, the flags and oaths (the very language

I wanted to forget), the Celts, the Saxons, the housebroken

Vikings in crowded trains, hopping frozen behind stalls

selling tat to tourists. Not enough time for loving because of

other loves, nor codebooks nor guides except the perennial

A to Z of not giving offense. The words were always there,

smooth like pebbles (soap on the tongue), and sometimes

the mockery of a commonplace, like that time when we put

up a blackened Union Jack instead of curtains between us

and the Poles on the scaffolding across the road.

On occasions it seemed good enough to be happy or scared

with the rest, to bring home from the terraces and parades

that sly acceptance, to sit in the shadow of atavism as under

a palm tree, and chew blissfully on the sweet dirt, the taste

of the crowd. Or for an evening make a shortcut through

someone else’s work, an incomer’s story of a homeland

gained not lost, a fat compendium of patriotic verse;

in essence, cheat again. In other words — never spend

too much on a suit rarely worn    ...    if there had been

loyalty at all, it fell on faces and disappeared with them,

on promises and smiles, crazy schemes for finding

undiscovered shores. The world, I thought, could be unfolded

anywhere, if only you could fit it into a travel bag, into a clear,

irrevocable word. It is strange perhaps that even today

I think the same, still in the same place, buried firmly

like a rock in a graveyard, as heavy, and as pointlessly

decorated by lightness. The vows of yesterday skim

the heights like animal shapes we recognize in passing

clouds; postcards sleep in the unread books. Just like

the nomadic tribes used to, I learn of myself only

with my feet now, from the single map that remained.

And when streets bring the shortened future a bit nearer,

with open palm I seek the roughness of the facades,

and in the friendly pain I find the coarse, unperfected

truth of things. This, I think then, must be what it’s like

in the bellies of gigantic animals: wet and quiet, almost

pleasant, once you get used to the smell of those who

passed through before you, and the immutable truth

that there is no going forward or anywhere else    ...