Florida

There where balmy air

stirs roses, blooms of winter;

there, where oceans meet to mingle

north to south;

there, where my love lives

and breathes, where palm trees 

catch the breeze and rattle,

heat waves rise from tiled roofs,

and stones chat in the stream.

There, where gaiters gape at gods above, 

not knowing why they ape his powers,

where sea gulls acrobat,

where pelicans could hide a cat,

where dreams of summer glide

all winter-tide and more,

where shells adorn the shore 

and smooth the sand,

and where my inner heart lives 

enclosed you understand.

There where dramas of our civilisation

take their grotesque forms,

where troubled millionaires abound,

with fiery dogs as hounds

to hunt the robbers, thieves,

while they sit at their ease,

directing all around, 

as if they owned this life,

and never bat an eyelid for the ordinary,

mundane, just sip their third Champagne,

and know the drink by name;

and cast an eye on poverty 

disdain within their blink,

and all those good Floridians 

wash up beside the sink

of our society,

sobriety, or in clink they find 

themselves on shelves,

deported from the ordinary place,

so commonplace, so free,

yet bound in life its protocol 

harmony.

There where sunsets come and go

full-blooded fine and fiercely coloured,

hurricanes twist their columns 

tall, and send next weeks food to the sea

there, where still the heat bakes down

singeing the edge of quiet squares,

where beasts at night raid dustbins 

with a frightful din

no man would wish to let them in, 

inside their comfy houses,

their villas, gardens, piers, 

their new cut lawns, 

and their wardrobe of ties, 

they're sunbathing, becoming brown 

like Indian's on reserves,

so strange a pass time this

when life is full of blissful things to do,

like walking rowing too, along the Everglade 

canals under skies of blue

oh why do we think its so blue

it is, because I have you.