Bedtime Cigarette - 3.35 am; or; Nameless Birds

One thing that can make you feel foreign (and no matter how literate as you think you are) is the sound of birds foreign to you.

Birds are chirping in the night,

Birds for which I have no name.

They could be the nightingales of odes,

Or the sparrows of cities’ gutters,

But regardless if I learn what,

I know they are not mine.

They are not the pigeons of Amman,

Nor the ducks and swans I’d met on TV

Before I saw them live in concert

By the pool of Mowbray.

Do I dare to call for the doves

And yearn for the larks of Palestine?

What of their shapes, and of their chirps,

Lost from the canons I would read,

With only symbols in their place:

Is what is ‘ours’ always able to be ‘mine’?

Or am I a hypocrite, bearing a cross,

Speaking of a history of passions,

But foregoing the bread

For the joys of the wine?

My creeping smoke mixes

With the setting fog

And in its crude courting it creates

Something abjectly obnoxious

Yet momentarily warm:

Something that is unidentifiable,

Of parts assembled without a whole,

But to my heart, definitely,

Something that is mine.