IN BUDAPEST
Sitting on a marble statue
with Atilla Joszef
trying to find
a poem in my suitcase
that a Parisian flautist
set to music,
an accordion player
with a marble eye
catches my melancholy
and plays a Roma sound,
trying to forget
Checkpoint Charlie
as in a James Bond
nest of spies,
my passport
stamped “Lost”,
the applicant no longer
needed in
this pop culture world,
drinking a flagon of beer
with a disc of the Bird
in my penny ante sax case
carrying me by chance
on another blown weekend
of dissonance
without a horn of plenty,
shooting out abstracts
in my own painted galley
hungering like Spartacus
once captured for Rome,
with a few letters
of my betters
on crucified strings
in straightjackets
of the bourgeoisie
back home.