(Song of) Affinity

I don’t know your manners

Cannot read your banners

Lost my bearings

and do not know the ways

You don’t know my anguish

Cannot speak my language

See these foreign fashions

and take me for a stray

Reduced to mime or babble

Forever helpless to unravel the clues

Still I’ll always share a border with you

You’re a luminary

Sought for sanctuary

The blinding brilliance

a gauge of my despair

Put me in your gunsights

Come at me with those searchlights

Exacting duty on all that I declare

Banished to the margin

where I ever am discharging my dues

Still I’m always on the border of you

You’ve got flags to wave

and armies of soldiers for your parades

But all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men

All of them a charade

It’s a lonely long while

Been too long in exile

Silently cursing the day we drew apart

Nothing breaks the quiet

Nothing stills the riot

that burns my head and cuts me to the heart

While you’re sequestered

behind diplomatic gestures

I see through

Still I’m always on the border of you

Out of myth and mysteries

Boasting noble histories

We bare teeth, hissing in senseless self disgrace

We quake and rattle

Primed for deadly battle

A call to arms that are not to embrace

In the name of borders

On guard, awaiting orders to move

Still I’ll always share a border with you

© Charlie Vavra, Right Riffs of Dover