Earbuds

by Alan Hill, , Poet Laureate, City of New Westminster, BC

Artwork: ‘River as Home’ (Bare Series 1) by Janet Kvammen

Sunday Morning in Glenbrook Ravine
In my broken sports gear
yesterday’s brand names bleached into braille

these running shoes that
concertina rain in a gas victim wheeze.

Here there is no creep to the cross.
This is another worship, direct, unmediated.
No socialites, hypocrites.

With Paul, circa Let It Be
his grey free beard, impractical fur coat.
He wobbles, mud overwhelmed, in
Cuban heals.

As he struggles to keep up, spills his mug of tea
chatters on about Linda, his new love
the vegetarian sausages
that will one day make him rich.

The soggy trackway, changeling, Lennon faced
a glittered brain of dying leaves
red, yellow, galaxy of rot,

rough thrown umbilical of death
that snakes down
circles at 33 and third into the valley end.

It is just Paul and I, here, in
this unknown cut of land between condos
the remnants of a Federal prison site

exercising in our hermitage,
poor mans pocket paradise, escape route

‘White Album’ on repeat, one earbud each.