Around Again

[Matthew McKeown]

Ok, here's my first shot in this forum. Enjoy - or not :)!

Around Again


Some say we’re back at the beginning,
but maybe it’s just the intermission,
and we’ve forgotten where we’ve left the popcorn.
The movie plays on,
but we’re still in the lobby
eternally wondering if the guy will get the girl
or vice verse.


We play a slick reversal, and soon
it is we who know how to call the shots
and do the chasing,
around the block corner
over the railroad tracks
where we find the old boxcar of our dreams
with the hairy mustached man sitting there,
waiting for us to jump aboard the moving steel
and leave the rocks under our shoes behind.


We enter a new world we may return from eventually -
now returning seems silly.
Trees fly by on the way to somewhere
and blue sky doesn’t look so real
when eyes dilate and lose focus
on the specifics of life.

Hi Rocky,

Many have said your poem was too cryptic. I personally thought it was about the nostalgia of life gone by.  The movie theater and railway car you describe speaks to an age of innocence. A time that we can revisit in our minds and hearts but can not return to. Like when as an adult one can smell the inside of a child's crayon box and be for a moment transported to grade school. You depiction of looking out of the train window and the sky and trees a blur is like life passing by too quickly. It was a sad and bittersweet poem of an older wiser self longing for yester years. Just my thought. Thank you for your art.