When we travel again
1.
When we travel again
Let humility pause
Our first step
Over the threshold
Gently follow its arc
Of next world discovery,
It’s been a stretch
To recall how things work
Out there in the crowds
Thinly clad and exposed
Swaying for balance
In our flip flap pell mell,
Now we’re gaining some poise
A wear-with-all stance
From seeing the lack of cushioning
In other’s shoes.
Glimpsed from afar
Earth is rising
With stone cold questions
About where we are going.
We’ve stalled in our orbits
Lost global positioning
Carried people poorly
Into the fast lane,
Now the kids are complaining
(How they might!)
From the back seat
None of our devices are working
Denial of generation service.
We let others take us
Beyond our means
To tell friend from foe,
In this silence
The truths have tightened
Around our ethical equator
Rising hot air
Melts these
Imaginary poles
Of our attraction
To difference.
I will not name them:
The bio-terrorists
Forever war mongers
Selling us time shares in stupidity
From untouchable plinths
Scripture has crucified the poor again
Kissing the baloney stones.
2.
When we travel again
Let us worship the small print
For this fragile assembly
Of cell reproduction
In this billion year spreadsheet
Trading life standards
Have been breached,
Complexity governs
In simple truths
Nature bats last
We’d loaded the bases
Forgot the rules of the game.
When we struck out
From the caves
We painted the whole animal situation
Now our bloody palm prints
Glow in the dark
Easy picking
For those we’d unearthed
Washed down Andean slopes,
Now the primitive tree hugging truth
Divulged under deep green state cover
About a viral conspiracy
To consume everything
Exit – pursued by locusts.
The ice has heard the news
Broken its fast, turned to leave
The stage, in altered states we pick up
The time signature
Cast our eyes over the score
At the wake
Lines for old friends
Their bodies released back to us
As we stand by the long boats
Decoding the message
Warriors no more.
3.
When we travel again
Let’s share rescue packages
Of essential life rations
Gift economy wrapped
No hierarchies
Need apply,
We’ve seen their desire
For disaster big brother
They’ve Primed
Pharmed and oiled us
Locked stock and lead barrels
For a gloop coronation
Of collective desserts.
But we’ve not been idle
Cowering out of sight
Behind the sofa
Learning animal magic
For the mutual aid circus
Restored muscle memory
Why we played together
To sustain the whole tribe
Some had to be cast aside.
So let us air those conditions
To these news corpses
Before we link arms
Plough shares on the Commons
Expose the silver tongued babies
To our good weather spooners
Let them sheik their booties
And wealth libidos
When we tighten our reef knots
On their shipping news isolation.
4.
When we travel again
Let’s pay our pals properly
Embrace scream saver ideals
With welcome wagons
In no migrants here land
Savour the spaces they’d love
To return to after clutching
Tarpaulin Air B & B.
Go without agendas,
Files, flask or phone
Sample instead the slow ebb
Of dusty roadsides
Stall for pleasure
No longer
Bound by room service smiles.
Leave the hulking jumbos
Grounded in the strata
Of the time we didn’t preserve
The floating diesel prison hulks
Hiltons for barnacles and horse-shoe crab
Dancers of half billion year tides
Throw a message back at us.
Out of recycled bottles let us pluck
Renewed hope
For a great age of sail
Song and soul
Toast the Greta line
With carbon free bubbly
Salute dolphins off the port bow
Feel the salt sting of our futures.
Grieve not for the travel insurance companies
Their gilded psych-ops
Sleep walk us through
Jagged graph hinterlands
On stealth manoeuvres to deprive us
Of our sharing goals,
Let those in the hospitality sector
Open their doors to the rising sun
Singing out ‘bonvenon’
Without cold calls in haste,
They’ve put us on hold too long
Now we want the whole baggage tour
A planetary refund.
5.
When we travel again
Let us learn a new language
To our Elders and
G- number theorists:
Stop stringing us along!
Speculate now on your high wire falls
Cushioned by love’s
Great transactions
Essential workers
Stopping your heads from
Falling into an empty basket
Of currencies.
Les Pauvres have shown the way
Let them lead you with mercy
Tweak your thumbs a little
At the cross roads
See you force an
Ordinary smile
Meet a devil of a re-education.
No longer need we sing the blues
From our kitchens
Choking frustrations,
This mote of dust
In a sunbeam
Can gleam in its hubris
Let it pass on then
Love’s hitchhiking genes
On the road
Of humility
Less travel
Is more.
© J.Purkis 2020
Annotations and influences
- ‘Nature bats last’ is the website name of controversial ecological scientist Guy MacPherson
- Robert Johnson’s famous hitchhiking song ‘Crossroads’ (1936)
- Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale
- The ‘Earth rise’ photo taken from Apollo 8 by William Anders
- Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot book.
- Herbert Gintis’ essay ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Altruism: Gene-culture Co-evolution, and the Internalization of Norms’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 220, (2003): 407–18. He notes how genes optimise cooperative solutions to ‘drive out norms that are both socially harmful and individually fitness reducing’. Similar work on the emergence of empathy as an evolutionary strategy appears in several books by Christopher Boehm.
- There’s a bit of nod to Simon Armitage’s uplifting 1999 poem ‘Couldn’t we just’ about ballooning.