Tourist

[jim turner]

So you’ve been there and seen it all,
incredible wonders, inscrutable smiles,
heard musical untranslatable tongues,
suspected snickering behind your back.
Your heart shut its eyes to insolence,
contemptuous stares on streets
whose names you can’t pronounce..

Now you will enhance your home’s
familiar litter, stuffing albums,
shelving made-in-china souvenirs,
richer doubtless for packaged adventures
fast-forwarding through uncaptioned memory,
but poorer in the pocket, to be sure!
(Jeez! What we paid for breakfast
over there would feed us for a week!)

Shut in so long, that grows-upon-you smell
of your house struck you as–well–foreign.
And were you so transformed, so strange,
that Fido, bailed from his three-week sit,
balked, a bit reluctant with his tail,
had doggily given you up for dead
and doesn’t believe in resurrection?
No, his nose was fooled by residues
of alien odors imported in your clothes.
Well, he’s home again, and so are you,
where maybe you should have stayed.
Tonight? The TV news, a drink or two, the usual,
and off to bed and jet-lag dreams.
Monday it’s back to the same old grind,
wearing a mask that hides your lie:
“We had a fabulous time.”

Jim 5/8/09

[judih]

postcard from an honest tourist

[hester_prynne]

Really enjoyed this read, really like your style.
H