Flaneur to Pilgrim

 FLANEUR TO PILGRIM

Long after I will have left this place

step into the spaces that will remain

unclaimed, un-erased, because I left them blank,

deliberately, emphatically, loudly blank.

Spaces of freedom, locales, not mine,

but those I inhabited, the uninhabitable,

like a flaneur wandering in alleys, bye lanes,

old marketplaces where nothing surprised,

Pick up the cues and wander in them,

let your heart freely range,

until my words and thoughts will cease to speak

and lead you to the dark hiding places of your own.

How much remains, and what remains

when the old manuscript pages are palimpsests

of erasures, both deliberate by the hands of the scribe

and those when Time will intercept.

You may trace the evolution

of a scribe who began as a flaneur

and somewhere along when the tedium began,

searched for the path of a pilgrimage