I catch my reflection, mirrored in enormous syncopated windows
I’m a moving passport caught in an assembly line,
within the machinations of air travel.
Cathedral waiting rooms bewilder me, I’m immersed
in psychedelic carpets, drowning in strange whirlpool twists.
I look for the altars on which to lay my boarding pass down,
It’s a reverence I apply to each flight priest.
I shift onwards. trekking my way to outlying perimeters;
Hitchhiking on horizontal escalators
following infinite endless signs, dismayed by
dismal flashings of electronic activation,
exhorting me to an incoherent backscattering of
my crucial connections, pursued and pilloried
by incessant muffled speakers in muted language.
I gaze forlornly for interpreters,
communicating to deadening circles, some meandering
insanity reverberating in this purgatorial netherworld.
I walk the long infinitesimal avenues of lino,
looking for elucidation, waiting for that
confident buzz of completeness.
I’m startled by the solipsistic Lurid Bar
It’s blitzed out lighting wishing me ‘Happy Trails’.
I’m evaporating, this airport osmosis is diffusing me,
I wonder if waxed wings would be the answer.
I stand, fingertips on the window, stoically tapping
blindly staring, into the cosmos, thinking
That Icarus should have travelled at night.
Lee Thomson
Dunedin, NZ
