San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly

Brian Thorpe
Migration                     
 
You perched on the ledge that day at Harvard You gazed downward and
inward, despondent, dejected but not yet determined.
 
You reviewed the twenty preceding years, The parents who abandoned
you, the friends who failed to comprehend your frailty, the lovers who
came and went like box cars on a desolate track, the studies of this
and that in chalk dusted classrooms that now seemed so many vacant
sophistries.
The poverty of loneliness enveloped you and stubbornly remained like a
moorish mist.
Then you gathered your resolve.
 
Perhaps for a millisecond some salvaging voice buried inside like a
souvenir in an attic trunk cried "No. Don't" but did so much too
feebly.
Perhaps the memory of some tremulous joy posed the possibility of more
to come, but did so with the glad hand of empty promise.
Perhaps the faces of those who would mourn gave you a hesitant respite
but their tears were yet to come, and you wouldn't be here to regret
having caused them.
 
Such was the moiling tide of mind that defined your fading twilight.
So you sat perched and for a moment looked upward alive, yes ALIVE for
a few seconds more.
 
You turned one last time to behold your guitar resting in the corner
of the dorm room then you leaped and the plummet commenced, void of
song.........void of plumage........void of wings.