Oscar Wilde With a Betting Ticket

It is an odd kind of symphony,
all tinkling glass, with each gust of wind,
a new sprinkling of sound
just behind where you site.

Shards lie on the ground all around you.
as you sit in a chair from the sixties
that some how has miracuously survived
both weather and faling glass.

In front of you is where the race track once was,
now an overgrown field of wildflowers and grass
as high as your waist.
You can just make out the track

where the horses once ran,
their hoofs churning up dirt,
leaning foward as they run, flank to flank.
the crowd loud and raucus, more than a bit drunk.

All gone now. Replaced by broken glass
and grafitti. A bit of police tape
around the front of the stands
to protect trespassers like me from falling glass.

And that is what you are. A tresspasser.
A mild mannered explorer who crosses lines
into the abandoned, takes pictures and then sits,
letting your imagination recreate

a world you are not old enough to remember,
but young enough to create.

You sit. There is time to listen to the music
of wind and glass and abandonment.
You sit and remember what you never knew,
the energy and the passion,

the temporary madness,
not unlike passion or a brief affair,
all noise and hunger and in the end, for most,
loss.

Perhaps you are better off old,
but not this old. Better off in the quiet life
you live, with more sustainable passions
that what once lived here.

Still it is pleasant to imagine yourself
a bit wilder than life allowed,
Oscar WIlde with a betting ticket
living without worry, making noise

and not caring who hears it.

About this poem

I live a quiet life. Mostly I like it that way. But now and again, I confess to an underlying wildness.

The picture was taken at an abandoned race track just south of Pownal, Vermont. Regular readers know about me and abandoned buildings. I cannot resist them.

Tom