Tuesday poem #520 : Guy Elston : A Personal Journey

 

                 “You either go to heaven or hell.
                   I’m going in a first class seat to heaven.”
                                         - Jason Derulo

Not saying anyone deserves what we get
or to be damned, not telling you not to identify.
But. Something else embarrassing is how much I love
the CN Tower, its high-60s Thunderbirds retro-futurism.
Similarly, here I am chilling on the 522^nd floor
of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High Miracle’ in Chicago,
the personal flyers below as twinkly distant as the emissions
harvesting nets above, drinking a velvety cup
of cool serotonin to celebrate my 150^th birthday, and.
There’s a fly headbutting the pane. Personal space
is quite important to you isn’t it smiled my most successful
and sober friend; apocalyptic visions come naturally
and thrive in the future perfect, always will have done;
many people consider relapse a sign of complete failure
and long periods of abstinence a sign of complete success;
nothing’s so simple. Except. On a dated rocket
heading sunward (International Rescue grounded
due to smog and/or endangered goose flight) I know you know
we’ll go together, JD, on pre-paid economy tickets,
my knee knocking your fold-out table, our personal
hells touching on the armrest we, I’m sorry to insist, share.

 

 

 

 

Guy Elston is British and lives in Toronto. His poems have included by The Moth, The Honest Ulsterman, Anthropocene, Untethered and other journals. His debut chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was recently published by Anstruther Press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan