John Birkbeck
Excerpt from KotaPress Poetry Anthology Volume 3, 2003

Being Europed in Day-Mares

Tyres whine ever northward
from the crumbles of Rome
and what was once Pompeii,
I breathe in as dust.
The autoroute is a perpetual
mobius strip of macadam
swallowed up by the
voracious odometre.
I fly through dozing villages
and casinos asleep under the sun
where empty gaming tables
lay in wait for night.
I dream in wide-eyed trance,
day-dozing past shuttered palaces
of ancient but gingery countesses
in lust-lorne distress,
pumping their haunches solo
in darkened high-towered boudoirs,
dreaming, as am I, of Goteborg and
twisty interlacings of cobbled lanes,
and Gothic attics and haunted
beauty of Nordic faces,
of pouting girls distressed
by angsty cinemateophiliac dreams;
dreams to awaken instinct,
longings to return to the
mother-comfort of sleep
to dream of waking.

This poem was published in 0411.78, The Poetic Link, Homeless at Home.

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Author Bio
At age 72, I’m a late bloomer, and had not published any poetry until I was in my mid forties. I have since become the author of five books of poems. My poems, stories, reviews, articles and drawings have appeared in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and webzines and anthologies world-wide. Back in the 1960s, I had formerly edited a gossip column as well as a tall-tales column. I'm also the host and producer of a cable TV program called The Poets' Corner.