Image by Rrthakur22. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

The Mandalay hostel
Is a small shopfront
Peering over perilous sidewalks
And a begging man who I’ve fallen into the habit of providing a cheroot,
He happily extends his hand for it every day
And why should I not give him it.
It’s a mini bottle of Freedom whiskey that would make Orwell turn over in his grave,
If Françoise Hardy songs have become cliché I don’t know it in this small bunk,
The filters and lenses of the Sixties production
Remind me not of a time I experienced but of being a youth in October,
Of warm leaves crisp like the tight sensuality of sweaters
In dark chambers of the cinema.
When there is a fierce beauty of change like a Soviet theory of montage
Disruptions of chronology as in
The amber in the plastic or sepia of the screen,
One holds close like an intimate companion
Joyfully unpacking the French poetry.
In the morning another cheroot;
A jog down the palace moat,
Where colonial powers deposed the final king, and now it’s
A prominent base for the military dictatorship.
And where once I used to see in black and white dolly shots of significance,
I believe in a veritable eternity like Blake’s grain of sand, intrinsic to all mundane happenings;
At least as worthy of acclaim as The Bicycle Thief,
Now wondering if poetry can do the same
Without capital, solely in the imagination.
If it could be the vision that leveled
These craggy roads of dictatorship and oligarchy

Beyond bourgeois notions of representation.