The guidebook promised birds of paradise, impenetrable jungle, semi-nude tribes, palm-leaf huts wafting their fringed eaves. I've got mosquito netting clotted with dust, large bugs in a cold shower, plenitudes of naked scrotums posing for my camera. If I cancel my appointments with the mummified chief smoked by village elders and the brine pool across the woven-vine bridge, I could spend the day on postcards and pretend I'm talking to my friends surrounded by village ilders in penis gourds and grass skirts who pass round the postcards pointing out the sites of their lives, while loneliness, a drying rawhide noose, strangles my spirit. Mother's hand is lost in Woolworth's for eternity. I long for my personal helicopter to whirl me from this place I most wanted to be. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ENCOURAGED by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR A SECOND REVIEW OF THE GRAND ARMY [MAY 24, 1865] by FRANCIS BRET HARTE WEARINESS by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW SONNET: 31 by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY CURFEW MUST NOT RING TONIGHT by ROSE HARTWICK THORPE A MARTYR'S MASS; FATHER MIGUEL PRO, EXECUTED AY MEXICO CITY, 1927 by ALFRED BARRETT THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE by WILLIAM ROSE BENET |