C.F. Alexander - Poem

Obscure as Jude
peering through the palisades
of Christminster,
I pace the nervous streets
of my university town.
Unshaven natives, 
white as vampires, 
pass on rusty bicycles,
sporting tattoos 
through hole spackled tee-shirts.
I know their desire
to roll the sidewalk up behind them,
prohibiting trespassers 
in Mercedes and BMW's, 
extending the metropolis, 
rolling flat the remains 
of a once-secluded hamlet.

The coffee shops and pubs
refuse restoration:
here the paper-thin shrines to
Joyce and Yeats,
there the dusty images of
Morrison and Joplin
affixed among beer lights 
and digital marquees scrolling 
happy-hour specials in ruby 
dot-matrix letters.

I settle in a wrought-iron chair,
sipping cappuccino beneath 
a curb-side canopy.
I feel the grinding gears of 
my middle age resounding 
and realize my apropos 
position in this vista.

The old century waxes toward full,
entombing the casualties
of a thousand years
within a cold and callous number.
A new one lurks on the horizon,
rallying the first troops
of an infant millennia,
but I am neither one to usher
nor one to close the door
for these mammoth apparitions.
An expert witness,
sanguine, yet quite the skeptic,
I await the metamorphosis  
with all the lethargy 
and consternation
apparent in my placid city.