American Dream

Is it any different if I call this a story?

I was young,

I was oblivious,

I was pathetically inept

Of course, I wanted to live in Manhattan

and didn't get to live there at all.

There has to be a French woman behind all this,

improbable yet beautiful

mystifyingly sad,

alluringly provocative,

Mistakes, cigarettes, rainfall

A car driving along the highway

from a town never to return.

Can I look back at all this and ponder?

In a generation when prose writers are p*****s

and poets are only self-proclaimed

and a******s are everyone

I bothered to be mildly inventive.

We look for facts

but miss the didactic pathways

that leads to this exact moment

and then swiftly segways to another

synaptic connections both inside the human brain

and outside in a wide sociological context,

Connections are possibilities,

Every face is a day at the park

A city of possibilities

A loft full of ideas

A novel, the so-called great one

waiting to arrive.

I returned from a hallucinatory ordeal

Skeptical yet positive

Cynical yet alive

into the comfortable couches

spacious houses of friends and families

An American Dream, fulfilled.