After UA 14 Overnight to Heathrow

~ qbit 
Dawn edging London, that red-eye planet.
Reader, stand with me here in the hotel shower,
face-up to the spray.

Slowly turn up the heat until water is a lash.
Not penance, no. You understand
how this is necessary.

Agree it would be a mistake 
to reckon and tally. Or call back dreams 
from distant beds.

My clothes on the floor an abandoned spacesuit,
skin professing faith in time-travel.
There is nothing faster 

than light you say, from beyond the mirror's blur. 
No trick of gravity or imagination 
that grants us passage.

A twist of the tap unseals the locks.
I must learn to breathe.
Only the long way home.

“To be loved or broken,
to be born again or die…”
A woman waits for me.

*Salman Rushdie – “Quichotte”

The Sunday Muse

14 thoughts on “After UA 14 Overnight to Heathrow”

  2. Nice, “Q”. I’d like to be flying into Heathrow tomorrow. We have been in Nashville twice this year, Memphis once, and Jackson, Tennessee three times this year. Our daughter will soon be in London for a couple of week son a work project, she spent five years a few years ago. That meant we had to visit London ten times to see her and the family, then a few other times starting way before she went.
    Enjoy!!
    ..

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  8. So many excellent lines in this–you make that moment standing under the lash of heat and memory as vivid as if I were there myself, your Rushdie quote pierces, and all the short stanzas add up like beads on an abacus to cipher the heart. I especially like the fourth and fifth tercets, and of course, the killer last line.

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    1. Thank you so much. Really appreciate that. Not my usual fare, a bit hard to know how well it reads to others. (OK, that us always true, lol! But I hope you know what I mean!)

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