How Reality

One day you must come. You must
see just what you want to see. For why
should we be concerned with reality. And
what is it?
Plastic stools, paper cups with tea leaves limp
in the bottom?
Is it me who emptied five of those cups and now
must pee?
Or is it the ancient, immovable, undrownable, un photographed
mountains sinking and soaring
in mist. And the feeling
that behind the sky there are not
stars but more of such giants hidden.

Is it phone lines and how they got there? Is it
rubbish swimming in a soup of our exhaust? Or is
it the river that really is a dragon and we shall
never tame it, laugh nearby as we may.

Is it rock, touchable, slapable? Or is it
the suspicion that I could swim
towards it and never make it. Is it that
you are nowhere in reach, past, now, later, but
I can't leave you there.
I think of you, someone I don't know, and what
you would not say. What you have not said,
but maybe we share?

Is it the acid smoke from the man leering near me, or the
pallable absense of your face, blank and taken away by such
mists and clarity?

Is it the passengers watching, always and especially
when I raise my face (or watching nothing but the cards
they've bet change on?) Or the man in clothes the colour
of his land, straigtening up as if to watch us all, clowning,
passing his constant home from which
he cannot, will not ever move,
and is not seeing me, but the ghost
of mountain and cloud that has led me like a pillar
and covers me. These? Whose people are they? Are they
not mine?

How I have to blink slower to breathe.
How I wonder at warm tears and thus, selfish, stop them.
How reality.