"This Country: When You Tire of Travels, Come Home" audio recording

This Country: When You Tire of Travels, Come Home by FoxThePoet

This Country:

When You Tire of Travels, Come Home

when your feet grow tired of globetrotting
and all the monuments to forgotten kings
have blurred into obscurity


when your shoulders ache
from carrying your whole world tortoise-style
from one rest-stop lover to another


when you’ve heard all the foreign tongues
repeat the same stories for the last time
and you’ve grown tired of translating


when your shoes have fallen apart
unable to martyr their soles
for your hobo evangelism …

come home
this country still longs for your sunrise
its geography is easy to map:

to the East lie my arms
curling inward to hold back time
their digits stretch northward
ten fingertips on separate crusades to find you
they unite only to pen poems about
the futility of kidnapping you across the borders
back into the caverns of my chest
overwhelming vacant since you stole its last inhabitant
which you unraveled the way Hansel and Gretel taught
to fashion a string to trace your route back here
these cave walls still shudder with your laughter
turning ribs into organ pipes
I play in dreams to orchestrate your reconquest
fool my yearning that you are only a hitchhiker’s thumb
and an hour from my doorstep —
a lie, but at least I can sleep through the night
without filling the hollow in my bed with my wailing
instead, try to keep it warm for you

to the South
are mountains of memories
impossible to scale without oxygen and a Nepalese Sherpa
they stretch to the clouds and in winter, blot out the sun
I chip at them with a pick axe of ink
take the pieces home to an orange juicer
attempt to squeeze out story after story
told in Homeric fashion
the gods of Olympus jealously dwarfed in the shadows
find their epics insufficient
Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Arjuna
camp in the foothills unable to scale you
talk about the good old days
when there wasn’t so much poetry in which to live
on the cliff sides I hunt for the road trips
the afternoon siestas
the midnight embraces
the slow Sunday mornings
for new word wombs
new poems to trap, take home, raise to maturity
and release back into the wild
for the world to see how you changed this boy
I will climb them as long as a pulse thumps me into movement

to the North is an ocean of your words
tide pools of sentences
waves of your stories
tsunamis of our arguments
to wash over any fool who braves to sail them
on maps print the words, “Here Be Dragons”
and I’m never sure which will swamp my boat
or carry me home
white-tip arrogance soothed by Sargasso Sea gentle honesty
choppy squalls when I lost myself to ego
pleas for forgiveness offered on Yom Kippur
all the poems over the phone blowing lost sailors to safe ports
someday when I have outlived you
I foresee abandoning shoes,
gripping frail hands on armrests,
rising from wheelchair
striping down to unflattering Speedo
and walking into these waves to drown
up to my ears in the waters of your laughter
filling my lungs with drops of your whispers

in the center is a house of paper
naked 8½ by 11s begging to be bathed in black ink
the first 30 stories are made of rough drafts
in preparation to meet you
the upper stories will be built to celebrate you
and when I reach my 90s
the tower will collapse with the weight
spreading the pages across this county
Billy Collins keeps an apartment across the hall from Derrick Brown
they meet in the lounge with Shane Koyczan and Ed Mabrey
have coffee on Sundays with R.C. Weslowski and Mike McGee,
each reading a new ode to you
they found that week on the cabinet
under the sink or behind the door
banisters Bill Campana will jot haiku from
window frames slam poems Klute will read aloud after bagels
dueling in rhyme with Shappy Seasholtz
sonnets on fireplaces Dan Seaman and Mikel Weisser will read in tandem
on weekends, CR Avery, Scott Dunbar and Lights
will play the ballroom made of canvasses
echoing through the vents all week long
on the upper floors
poets yet unborn ready to join to the conversation
there is room here
for whomever you choose to fill the house with
forgive the flesh of this man
for being made of flawed skin unedited
he knew not what he did
you always liked me better on paper anyway


to the West is an open country
as far as the eye can see
lie no walls nor borders
no future beyond what we make of it,
without a horizon to fall over
sunsets are unimaginable,
the land yearns for your footfalls
and I will chase you across it
until these feet break beneath me
never ask if it was all for naught
until you have seen the country you built here
the boy you reshaped who lives out in the open
uncertain of where to go now
penning poems from dawn to dusk
dreaming of your open arms
reading them to anyone who’ll listen


when you tire of travels
when you need shelter to rest weary limbs
when you want to see a boy left better
than the one you first met
this country is wherever you choose to meet me
ready to welcome you home


Written Sept. 28, 2010, a year to the day after meeting Azami.

This Country

when your feet grow tired of globetrotting
and all the monuments to forgotten kings
have blurred into obscurity


when your shoulders ache
from carrying your whole world tortoise-style
from one rest-stop lover to another


when you’ve heard all the foreign tongues
repeat the same stories for the last time
and you’ve grown tired of translating


when your shoes have fallen apart
unable to martyr their soles
for your hobo evangelism …


come home
this country still longs for your sunrise
its geography is easy to map:


to the East lie my arms
curling inward to hold back time
their digits stretch northward
ten fingertips on separate crusades to find you
they unite only to pen poems about
the futility of kidnapping you across the borders
back into the caverns of my chest
overwhelming vacant since you stole its last inhabitant
which you unraveled the way Hansel and Gretel taught
to fashion a string to trace your route back here
these cave walls still shudder with your laughter
turning ribs into organ pipes
I play in dreams to orchestrate your reconquest
fool my yearning that you are only a hitchhiker’s thumb
and an hour from my doorstep —
a lie, but at least I can sleep through the night
without filling the hollow in my bed with my wailing
instead, try to keep it warm for you


to the South
are mountains of memories
impossible to scale without oxygen and a Nepalese Sherpa
they stretch to the clouds and in winter, blot out the sun
I chip at them with a pick axe of ink
take the pieces home to an orange juicer
attempt to squeeze out story after story
told in Homeric fashion
the gods of Olympus jealously dwarfed in the shadows
find their epics insufficient
Odysseus, Gilgamesh and Arjuna
camp in the foothills unable to scale you
talk about the good old days
when there wasn’t so much poetry in which to live
on the cliff sides I hunt for the road trips
the afternoon siestas
the midnight embraces
the slow Sunday mornings
for new word wombs
new poems to trap, take home, raise to maturity
and release back into the wild
for the world to see how you changed this boy
I will climb them as long as a pulse thumps me into movement


to the North is an ocean of your words
tide pools of sentences
waves of your stories
tsunamis of our arguments
to wash over any fool who braves to sail them
on maps print the words, “Here Be Dragons”
and I’m never sure which will swamp my boat
or carry me home
white-tip arrogance soothed by Sargasso Sea gentle honesty
choppy squalls when I lost myself to ego
pleas for forgiveness offered on Yom Kippur
all the poems over the phone blowing lost sailors to safe ports
someday when I have outlived you
I foresee abandoning shoes,
gripping frail hands on armrests,
rising from wheelchair
striping down to unflattering Speedo
and walking into these waves to drown
up to my ears in the waters of your laughter
filling my lungs with drops of your whispers


in the center is a house of paper
naked 8½ by 11s begging to be bathed in black ink
the first 30 stories are made of rough drafts
in preparation to meet you
the upper stories will be built to celebrate you
and when I reach my 90s
the tower will collapse with the weight
spreading the pages across this county
Billy Collins keeps an apartment across the hall from Derrick Brown
they meet in the lounge with Shane Koyczan and Ed Mabrey
have coffee on Sundays with R.C. Weslowski and Mike McGee,
each reading a new ode to you
they found that week on the cabinet
under the sink or behind the door
banisters Bill Campana will jot haiku from
window frames slam poems Klute will read aloud after bagels
dueling in rhyme with Shappy Seasholtz
sonnets on fireplaces Dan Seaman and Mikel Weisser will read in tandem
on weekends, CR Avery, Scott Dunbar and Lights
will play the ballroom made of canvasses
echoing through the vents all week long
on the upper floors
poets yet unborn ready to join to the conversation
there is room here
for whomever you choose to fill the house with
forgive the flesh of this man
for being made of flawed skin unedited
he knew not what he did
you always liked me better on paper anyway


to the West is an open country
as far as the eye can see
lie no walls nor borders
no future beyond what we make of it,
without a horizon to fall over
sunsets are unimaginable,
the land yearns for your footfalls
and I will chase you across it
until these feet break beneath me
never ask if it was all for naught
until you have seen the country you built here
the boy you reshaped who lives out in the open
uncertain of where to go now
penning poems from dawn to dusk
dreaming of your open arms
reading them to anyone who’ll listen


when you tire of travels
when you need shelter to rest weary limbs
when you want to see a boy left better
than the one you first met
this country is wherever you choose to meet me
ready to welcome you home


I met Azami on Sept. 28, 2009. How my life has changed over the last 12 months.

Bill Murray reads poetry to construction workers

Bill Murray has always been one of my favorite actors, ever since I saw "Stripes" as a kid. However, he's become one my favorite famous people since I heard a recording of him introducing U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins before a reading to a college audience.

In the spring of 2009, Murray read poetry to construction workers on break from building the new Poets House.



Bill Murray is the fifth of nine children born to Edward and Lucille Murray. He and most of his siblings worked as caddies, which paid his tuition to Loyola Academy, a Jesuit school. He played sports and did some acting while in that school, but in his words, mostly "screwed off."

Bill Murray enrolled at Regis College in Denver to study pre-med but dropped out after being arrested for marijuana possession.

Murray then joined the National Lampoon Radio Hour with fellow members Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and John Belushi. However, while those three became the original members of "Saturday Night Live" (1975), he joined "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell" (1975), which premiered that same year. After that show failed, he later got the opportunity to join "Saturday Night Live" (1975).

Murray first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live, and went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films including Caddyshack (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), and Groundhog Day (1993).

Murray gained additional critical acclaim later in his career, starring in Lost in Translation (2003), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, and a series of films directed by Wes Anderson, including Rushmore (1998), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

Maple Leaf Heart

Maple Leaf Heart

She blindsided me on an idle Tuesday
like the "Wear Sunscreen" song warned
with the way relationships should begin

somewhere between kisses and climax
I start humming the Canadian national anthem
like I was born with a Maple Flag tattoo
scarred beneath the skin
"Oh Canada, our home and native land"
and I wish I known her years ago
before my knees broke beneath my ego

decades before I met her couchsurfing
she came out of nowhere
climbed into my bed and rested in my earlobes
so that when she asked
"what are you thinking aboōt?"
I'd pause on the lips of her Toronto accent
and wonder what makes Yankees and Canucks so different
blindsided by her tomboy tongue
my hesitation left her the space and chance
to slip her arms beneath mine and hold me tightly

I blame Canada
for erecting a border between us
that took years for her sneak across
and find me
remind me that after all my selfish one-night-stands
I might be worth loving for more than a drink
sober and sensual I want to explore her coastlines
chart the cartography of her ancestry
until it begins to blur with mine
find what lurks north of the islands
that disappear on maps
she's unexplored country
diving southward beneath waistlines
to illuminate all the secrets I've kept hidden
color them beneath auroras
in the land of midnight sun

she holds me without the shame of being in my arms
loves my languid limbs
that ache in daytime jobs
just to hold her again

she wears my shirts
as though I bought them in her anticipation
and I bury my face in her neck, her belly, her thighs
teach her that poet's prowess
lie not in speaking a thousand different tongues
but how we use the one with which we're born
in the most artful of silent articulations
making moist her hips from the waist down
where she speaks in only nouns and moans
in the vague attempt to hold her here for another day and another and another

whatever sins and salvations my tongue and lips have learned to speak
I can only embrace her beauties so long
before the road calls her from my bed
to two lanes of blacktop to the next city
the next adventure
the next story I can only imagine
in passing postcards
delivered after she's already moved on

I want to smuggle myself northward
swear allegiance to a new flag
reshape my heart into a maple leaf
so she'll know me by touch alone
as a Canadian countryman
fall asleep in her arms again
and learn to speak all the words
in an accent I used to mock her for
count my miles in her kilometers
and retire into the Saskatchewan countryside
forgetting the names of my old 50 states
tell children in ages and ages hence
that the Grand Canyon was once in my backyard
but barely deep enough to hold
all the poems I've written for their grandmother
who slumbers in the hammock outside
dreaming of the life we shared in a place called Sedona
where turquoise fell like rain
dreams flowed like the waters of Oak Creek
and I longed for a lover called Azami
though her name waited 30 years
to find itself spoken on my lips
worn raw through kisses down to the bone
so deep I can't seem to recall
how I lived so long
without her to hold me
in the shadows of the northern lights
stretching out fingers toward
her dirty bare feet still damp in midnight dew
asking me to follow her on yet another unplanned road
to a destination we can only imagine
and whose name we don't care to learn

her Yukon arms and Labrador legs
are the only borders I recognize
and ones I never long to leave



I performed this poem on Oct. 10 at the FlagSlam. There are obvious elements of Billy Collins' style, specifically
"... her dirty bare feet still damp in midnight dew / asking me to follow her on yet another unplanned road / to a destination we can only imagine / and whose name we don't care to learn ..." that remind me of "Nostalgia":

Nostalgia
by Billy Collins

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Slam Tutorial: Favorite Vices: Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing

William “Billy” Collins (born 22 March 1941) is an American poet. He served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In his home state, Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004. He was recently appointed Claire Berman Artist in Residence at The Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury, MA. He is a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Human beings are nothing if not lead by their vices. The world would be a much better place, more efficient, more productive if were weren't constantly pursuing our favorite vices, such as : drinking, smoking, & screwing.

However, life would be way too dull to even imagine.

And how productive would it really be in the long run? Half the reason we do anything is to afford the time and means to indulge in our habits in the first place, the other half reason is to assuage the guilt for having done them. Remove them both as we'd wind up dying in weeks, like kicked-over houseplants.

Asceticism has its place in the world, but the reason monks, nuns, hermits and priests can afford the time to renounce the world is because those who didn't built the monasteries, nunneries , temples and cloisters while the wealthy and worldly give the food and financial donations to keep them operational.

The anthology "Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times," assembles excepts by authors including Dorothy Parker, Erica Jong, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, J.P. Donleavy and Henry Miller on our most cherished triumvirate sins.

If you plan to write about your vices keep in mind that the audience can identifying with it. Illicit drug use, binge drinking, chain smoking and attempts to screw anything on two legs (male, female, straight, bi or gay, we all have sex drives) have always had their place in poetry. I guarantee the first poem ever written was by Og writing to Gort about trying to screw Thag after he looked really hot at the mammoth roast.

The Best Cigarette
By Billy Collins

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Billy Collins postulates the Prometheus of Rodents

William “Billy” Collins (born 22 March 1941) is an American poet. He served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In his home state, Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004. He was recently appointed Claire Berman Artist in Residence at The Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury, MA. He is a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

The Country
By Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time-

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

Don't forget Billy Collins

William “Billy” Collins (born 22 March 1941) is an American poet. He served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. In his home state, Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004. He was recently appointed Claire Berman Artist in Residence at The Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury, MA. He is a distinguished professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

One of my favorite poets is former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He is not a slam poet, just one of the most brilliant writers I've come across. He pisses me off in that he could write a poem about dog's toes or knackwurst and it would be more brilliant than half the poems out there. To me, he sounds like Kevin Spacey. I own a great recording of "Billy Collins Live: A Performance at the Peter Norton Symphony Space April 20, 2005" where he is introduced by actor Bill Murray.
If you enjoy reading really great poetry that doesn't take a lifetime to decipher but still knocks you on your ass with its brilliance, pick up one of his poetry books. I own copies of the highlighted titles and often pull a poem or two out of them when I'm hosting the Sedona Poetry Open Mic.
* Pokerface (1977)
* Video Poems (1980)
* The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988)
* Questions About Angels (1991)
* The Art of Drowning (1995)
* Picnic, Lightning (1998)
* Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001)
* Nine Horses (2002)
* The Trouble with Poetry (2005)
* She Was Just Seventeen (2006)
* Ballistics (2008)

Forgetfulness
Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.