with cigarettes giving on to high windows
with sombre bottles empty tunes
I meditate on schemes lacking financial
viability – how relaxing these dilettante
portuguese imaginings in the out of the way
city of Budapest
they only allow for the arrival at this isolated place
at Plan B: a text the author doesn’t
chisel away at inside the café
but I propose:
forget all this the cuban posters the curious
blonde waitress and proceed to the next poem
with no great regrets
and avoid lingering on a fresco of clouds
on the ceiling of a bedroom (which one?)
celebrating the end of no vintage at all
realising what a juvenile mistake it is to close a poem
with the word death
above all I won’t mention Walt Whitman to you
or David Beckham
but afterwards, I beg you
be late again suspend for a moment the reading
with one of those empty gestures: the scratching of a head
of a chin
wait for this author to make up ground
and let’s both set off downwards – is there another place? –
to the next poem