Call Home Aug - 22 2025

 

Call Home

Aug 22 2025



The city changed.

As if, in my absence, it would have waited,

put ambition on hold,

sent all the newcomers home

then barred the door.

As if bigger was better.

As if limits were to living

what a fishbowl is to fish.

As if growth

was not only natural 

but imperative. 

But while the city changed

is it possible I didn’t?

In all the time since

have I simply been arrested,

stuck 

in the state I left it in;

stagnant

passive

inert?

Too unaware

complacent

content with myself

to have grown or evolved?

I feel like a stranger in my home town.

Which even back then

was hardly a “town”.

The Rockwell painting I have in my head

never existed;

the city

was already too restless, too big

for me to have fit

let alone explored.

So I feel stateless. 

Like a dissident,

summarily deported

with nowhere else to go.

A refugee, whose passport was lost,

robbed of all he had

carried on his back

in some lawless wilderness.

The man in the terminal

bathing in the sink

and sleeping in chairs,

trapped 

with no plane to catch

in a no-man’s-land

of bureaucratic indifference. 

A sovereign nation of one.

Like a solo sailor

lost at sea,

an astronaut

at the end of his tether

rationing air.

But whose past is also artificial,

as ephemeral as Shangri-La,

as nostalgic 

as false memory allows.

So both then and now

no place in the world

to belong

settle down

call home.

Hmmm, anther poem about feeling I don’t fit in. 

Although it didn’t start that way. It actually began with a memory, like a mental snapshot, of emerging into downtown Toronto from the Island airport after a very long absence. The impression was of bafflement and overwhelming busyness: the giant buildings, and the streets like deep narrow cantons between them; the traffic, noise, and congestion; and the complete unfamiliarity of the place. 

Nominally my “home town”. But that was not only another time, but really another place: a quiet suburb, from which —  as a timid and solitary young man — I hardly went far from. The ”timid and solitary young man” who has remained that way and isn’t thrilled about it. (Remained that way, that is, all except for the “young” part!) Developmentally arrested indeed!

The poem is also inflected with my concern about our unsustainable lifestyle (nothing new there!): the ethos of growth that underpins our culture, economy, and politics. Biology teaches that there are limits to growth: populations only grow so much before they crash. Is modern civilization possible without growth? How would a circular economy work? Will capitalism ever adapt to such a thing?

I suspect I pushed the analogies a little too hard. Probably because I admire a good analogy, don’t think I’m very good at them, and don’t practice them enough. So perhaps I’m over-compensating!