Greycastle V

The day comes quietly into the city streets

Like water spilling slowly over castles in the sand

Cool grey mist upon the uncomplaining pavement

Another night I've spent awake and found nothing

nothing

But empty faces that muttered half-heard words

And shapeless hands pointing

Another direction

another street another highway

Chicago New York L.A.

The city is always the same

A broken shadow play of light and voice

A catch as catch can of reality and illusion

And I a ghost haunting spectral streets

am lost without my soul

I see it more and more each day

It is not you for whom I search

but me

For you have stolen all my hopes my dreams

They flit about invisible

And where they are I cannot know

Chicago New York L.A.

Like a car in endless motion I am hypnotized

The miles roll out beneath my wheels

I sit and stare as faceless headlights

Plow the furrows of the road

Behind the blankness of my eyes

My thoughts go flying up

Until the city lies spread out beneath me

its magnitude is staggering

Inside the car my slack-jawed body steers

Odysseus without Penelope

I wander the interstates the city streets

The fog embracing more and more

While the radio croons

as none remain to loose me from the mast

your siren song will haunt me all my life

such seas are not like roads that one can map

and never shall the homeless find his wife

Seven eternities loom ahead

As many more behind

My four-door flying dutchman winds

Its way as it knows best

Chicago New York L.A

... and all the rest

Christopher J. Cramer

July 1984