A re-working of Odysseus

Odysseus Before The Window.

I hear a trumpet this night that sounds

like a heart squeezed between two dawns,

blown by the memories of footsteps

trod on other people’s lawns.

I can visualize the trumpeter’s thick lips

pursed with pain needing to be shed, her cheeks

inflated, walls trying to protect; a sound produces -

seduces the spaces between the disks of my spine

as I stand naked to this night’s ambiguous shrine.

It is an implausibly hot night, the air

a lair within my head to catch thoughts

that should have been put to bed.

This heat makes everything unreal.

Trapped before the window - a mast

in this city’s ocean of night - unable to flee

or fight; the trumpet’s sound creates me,

berates me, calls me home

and away again as it pries into my mind.

I grow fearful I might forget who I have become –

the choices that cannot be undone; the actions,

thoughtless and destructive, that litter…

sun-glinting bottles strewn beside a highway.

This Vincent night – the city’s colours melt,

merge, bend with sounds, with smells, with memory;

the stars pushing through the smog are not

right and yet their swirling bright attack on the dark,

like that trumpet, gives me heart as I stand in the front

of this open window. The belated breeze hounds,

the brick spits heat, my mind treads old sentences,

merges verbs to nouns, imagines a thousand possible

excuses that are swallowed before the lie is set to flight.

She stirs behind me – I remember

it was originally her smile, then the way her right

hand twirled her reddish hair; the blouse

spread and  the nipple not yet erect, kissed

and as I flared

I surrendered to the call of the beast.

I had hoped this was not a reality  

or that this me standing here

was not…

That the picture I had tried to paint

as my life

had become

and the trumpet was soothing

not

The Siren calling me out again.