~les Vacances Sont Fini Poem by Mike Finley

(Vacation is over)

How can on think of going home
To the gristle of living
The pummel of performance
The ordinariness that mugs you
And shakes you down
Till change fountains from your
Pulled-out pockets?
One may live like the Baron of Beynac
Resolute and armored
More trilobite than man
Brooding from his granite rampart
A danger to all who glance up
And get blinded by surmise.
Or one may return as tourist-as-clown
Always feeling for his pocket
The joker in the deck whose
Hat-horns dangle, unerect to the last,
Not “I know” which is a wall of stone
To crouch behind,
But “I think” or “perhaps” or
“unless I’m mistaken, ” all hedged
And botanical and bearing red berries
A little translucent once held
To the light.
And one would be slow at all that one does
Slower than a sloth to minimize
All sense of ownership because who
Is an author, we are really all actors
All playing our part,
And “Introducing, as the sloth, the sloth, ”
But be thorough because
Time has been set aside to do so
Not the flash of lighting that singes every sage eyebrow
but the thick ooze that lubricates the belly of the slug