Letter To America

Is the debris from our childhood
still strewn across the lofts
of houses we left years before?
Where’s that old poster
of the New York skyline you hung
on our Essex bedroom wall because
the image could get us there.
You said it was Feng Shui
but you were fifteen,
you never explained.

Now you sit by the Cornish coast,
a blanketed brother,
folded in from me,
intent on wave watching.
Waiting for what
to carry you where?
Your letter didn’t explain.

The New York tickets
sit in my pocket like drowning stones,
took too long to get, too late to give,
a voice explained no one could insure
against the inevitable.

That poster on the wall
was your letter to America
and it did transport us away
from the suffocating everyday.

I put the tickets in your hand,
there was magic once, might be again
just enough to let us both believe
we’re going.