terminal [2010]

...but here...not sitting...not trying to write...about lawn chairs...not poems...ignoring what's not the golden light...the light of a month that's been mistaken for November...and my hair...and my neck...and my arms...this writing mistakenly touching the light...waiting to touch a few yellow lines of this light...this lawn chair...not a poem...lit from beneath and golden...what?...yellow?...yellow leaves of golden lawn chairs?...not so...not written about...not mistaking it for a well-lit November...trying to write poems about light...standing...not trying to write about writing...or November...or sitting...in well-lit golden lawn chairs...arms not mistaken for golden...nor my hair...nor my neck...lit from behind...more yellow than golden...perhaps a yellow stripe where not golden...and finally letting go...of here...of my ignorance of here...wait...stripe?...a yellow stripe?...not a golden light...not so...so...not sitting here...not writing about here...ignoring the presence here...of a mistaken golden light...yellow poems mistakenly applied to golden light...a light sitting beneath a golden lawn chair...astride a month that might once have been November...not now...not a month...not a poem about a month that's not November...a golden poem that's nothing but yellow...not about November...or my yellow hair...or arms...or neck...not a yellow sickness...not in November...or in a well-lit poem about golden mistakes...cough!...sickness?...a yellow sickness?...no...not now...not in this light...one must not mistake this yellow for sickness...nor a poem for a lawn chair...or sitting for standing...or not...not letting go...letting go of the light...the lawn chair one is not sitting in...not writing about a golden terminal sickness...not mistakenly touching the light of a month that is most certainly not November...not a month...not lit from behind...stop...terminal?...the terminal?...

"...and what if all this time I had not stirred hand or foot from the third-class waiting-room of the South-Eastern Railway Terminus, I never dared wait first on a third class ticket, and were still waiting to leave..."
  — Samuel Beckett