Suicide Lane Cafe

Things I Didn't Know I Liked

I am sitting on the Prague-Vienna train

Forgotten book curled next to me. 

I never knew I liked

Night descending like a tired bird on an olive branch. 

(Should I be comparing nightfall to a tired bird?)

I never knew I liked

Soft curls of cigarette smoke trying to reach the sky

Or the Earth. 

Can someone who's never worked the earth like the Earth?

(It's probably platonic.)

and look here - 

I've loved rapid rivers all this while

but I never realized I liked motionless rivers too,

skirting hills sprinkled with chateaus

I never knew I liked trees

Bare branches of birches

Leafy maples in Moscow near Abramtsevo

Where I sat translating War and Peace.

And rain, whether it falls like a net

or spatters against the glass in waves

leaving my heart confused and tangled

and sending me off to unchartered countries I didn't know I liked

Where I'd sit looking at the moon 

- moonlight the falsest the languid the petit-bourgeoisie -

and struggle to decipher the cramped writing 

of a professor who'd dreamt of being a painter. 

I didn't know I liked chawanmushi 

Until I chewed on a gingko seed while

sitting cross-legged in a shop in Nagasaki

Wondering how many people had died at the hands of Fat Man.

I didn't know I liked all these things 

And I had to travel the world to realise.