Where Art Thou?
by Dylan Dykins

Amid the crumpled lager cans
At the back of the park bench
He remembers lurching flowers

But when the priest echoed his name
From vaulted stone
He fled.

In the red-
Probed gloom
Of the night-club

Amid thrashing arms and legs
Nothing is lukewarm, and
The brief violent fits

Of love do not offend his taste.

He rolls himself in aches
He made the flavour of,
An infant’s knee gashed,

A finger slammed in a door,
The presage of a heart-attack.
Then rests like the evening light

Blue amid the pine-tree,
Laughs as he guides
The gaping fool through his visions,
Strokes

The irretrievable in the wet eyes
Of a lover, breathes
Deep in the littered alley,

Enjoys for its own sake the
Convoluted arguments of politicians,
Remembering meanwhile

The smell of concrete mix and
The tides of clicking keys
That unite and divide millions,

Brittle seas of locust wings,

And the breadth and depth of histories,
The temptation to drift in endless seas, and dream
Of all there is and all there will never be and ever be

While the dutiful, sagging-faced husband
Snored gently in the pews,
So did he