Kathmandu

The curtain tore

as we walked off the page,

possessions parked with family and friends;

a lockup store off the A1(M) –

the city never tasted as sweet

as the night air rush

that festooned our flight,

skirting the mercurial giant

who never slept just

paused between breaths

like a Buddha reposed

while Mara danced on;

counter-clockwise flung

around the orbital rim

to that other agglomeration

of movement and light,

where we said our goodbyes

and slipped unseen into an

orderly industrial throng,

supplicants to a greater god

who bestrode the beckoning world beyond;

beyond this chamber of echoic babble,

these sunken isles,

this dead dead weight

that fell balletically away

as we climbed and banked

and glanced in valediction

at the humbled stump

of a fairy-lit hub,

lost to the softness of dreams;

dawn desert dunes over Iraq or Iran,

sculpted in shadow,

scale had no purchase,

we could have surfed our way east,

or space-hopped up to the roof of the world.

But we were already there:

we had stepped from the page.

Smoke from roadside evening fires

rose with the mist come morning.

February 2014