A Poem About Deja Vu

The sun sat like a satisfied baboon in the grass aglow,

the hibiscus air folded around me as I walked,

the metro station was waiting, its mouth agape as always

and it was Friday, July 13 2012.

I’m particularly sure of that because of what you’d said,

“I can’t help thinking we’ve done this before.”

The words clung to me for some time after you tossed them out,

a salmon flopping away in my dinghy, waiting to be kept or tossed back.

True, we had been there 365 suns prior and were bound to be so again.

Or maybe you were craftily referring to our bottomless souls

and any of the countless writers, athletes or popes which had hopped on

or hopped off the celestial bus once while making its rounds.

It even could have been a Foucault moment of yours, debunking

the notion of history all together - and much of the future for that matter -

drawing a heavy black line beneath the figurative there and then.

Or you simply meant we’d been there before. It’s possible.

What’s not possible is that when I punched my ticket twice, it was for nothing

because just thinking of you and where you’d been the day before - your smallish

hand in mine, our steps synchronized, your smile pointed up, mine down –

is something, albeit a small, creased something at the bottom of my coat pocket.