AT TRIESTE

Like James Joyce
sleep walking
in the city night
sheets to a kindled fireplace
of unwarranted imagination
collapsed into pitiless thought
for a guest in languor of a liquor
from an old bottle of brandy's
unbridled sweetness
in a bandy of winding phrases
at the ultimate pettifog night air
being in a repast of memory
yet wholly aware as any bird
lost like him in a forest's nest
in an exile's surroundings
hanging on the banister
you jest in low voiced riddles
here in Trieste
among unbridled knapsacks
of oboes ,clarinet and fiddles
by lasting vittles on the stove
for a moratorium of survival
exhausted from lacuna's
banter of Irish drama's verse
squandered in a selfish meal
exploding on a quarrel's trauma
of disentangled mindfulness
turned loose in informality
in a modicum of a traveler's wit
and a reveler's lonely music
in valid congeniality
hidden in magic Gaelic tongues
without a balanced sheet
of dwindled cash
from debit and debt
in a magnetic potpourri
under a future laurel wreath
a hidden stash of words
beneath the  snowy rungs
of a painter's ladder
you wonder
if it will matter
when Ulysses becomes
a classic.