Change Alley -a poem

Change Alley

Alley of change utterly changed.
The name of the place names
the lost decades, the places and times
gone with our belongings, migrated
along the routes buried or closed
to the country of changelessness.

Many dark tunnels ago, a child rode
on his father’s back through the trade of tongues,
the bazaar of puzzling scents and smells,
an underwater world of sailors
stale from the sea and travelers
drowned in dreams of home,

floating through its length skeined
with striplights and bare bulbs, the stalls
spilling over with imitation wares
for the unwary, watches, bags, gadgets and tapes;
in each recess he heard the conspiracies
of currencies, the marriage of foreign tongues
holding the key to worlds opening on worlds
for the waking senses of the child.

But most it was the laughing boxes
secreting peals of ghostly glee
derisive and disembodied, which held
the mind, kept the child listening
and fantoming still through the years
as if future was then held foretold
before the alley’s enchantment broke
in the dazzle of a weekend afternoon.

Later the grown man in loneliness
would return as evening snuffed out
the life of trade and the Sikh nightwatch
hauled from its silent depths a worn string bed
of questions to plumb the depths, to fetch
the echoes of consequence and distance
off all the alleys he had watched.

It seemed he had come through the changes
unchanged, searching still the place
for signs leading home, or out of the streets
emptying into loss, whichever way he took.
And while he waited the country flipped
the book of changes; street lost their names,
the river forgot its source, soaring towers
policed the skies and before the answer
could come like the laugh heard changes ago

the alley packed its stalls and followed
the route to exile, its nomadic spirit
inhabiting now the country of the mind.
All is utterly changed, the map useless
for navigation in the lost city. Only an echo
remains, the man haunting and sniffing
where the alley had been, measuring
its absence till the spirit of place returns,
till a door yields at the end and he walks
out free, changed beyond all changes.

boey kim cheng (from Days of No Name, 1992)

p/s: to kim cheng, sincere apologies for gross presentation. i didn't mean to distort the form. was faithful to every letter and spacing. after countless times of reform, i surrender to the fact that the blog has a mind of its own. mercy.