momentos nuevos

it may be the way i see the world
my perceptions are no doubt at times skewed
even i acknowledge some startling intellectual gaps and weakness
in my person

human only human

and i'd like to wax poetic but the topic is so prosaic so as to defy verse or lyric impulse

along with arrows
the yellow painted markers at every significant turn
on the streets on the telephone poles on the stone fences
on the corners of walls

quite another trail marker appeared
and my most startling awareness of being nearly lost
was the recognition that i no longer could see
the tell-tale indicators of true traildom

now to what exactly might i be alluding?

in the course of my coming to terms with
expressing this most curious observation
i only wish to state that it indicates something
amounting to a scientific observation
a statement of bold unadulterated fact

and it has to do with an essential but a sort of
private and sensorily unpleasant human physical necessity
bathroom stuff

at one significant level and i wish to state this
in this particular way for i know no other way to state it
that the camino is littered with white blotches of toilet paper
there
OK i said it i wrote it
i mean it i don't think i'm overreacting
 i think what i saw was real
mile after mile section after section
oftentime for miles at a time with relentless consistency
white bits of toilet paper
left to mark the side of the road where a someone
 i can't say who
stopped to do the bathroom do do or tinckle winckle shuffle
and little white mounds of toilet paper were everywhere
sometimes spread out in the brush
but usually damply and mushily sitting there with all the certainty of
territory markers

now i'm sure men just stop and go along the trail all the time
and it takes nothing to do that just a moment and a shake
but the girls do a wipe thing and maybe some of it is
snot cloths that people throw
but anyway
this was meant to be a poem about the white markers
that mark the sacred trail to santiago compostela

twice along the trail i inadvertantly stepped in
human and/or canine shit
i suppose when a person walks for a long ways
he's bound to step in some shit sooner or later

but i was very cognizant of the white splotches of toilet paper
marking the way
as consistent and as trustworthy as the yellow arrows

i tried to be careful and
go aways off the trail if i needed to take a humanphysical relief break
but i take it as a consequence of a mindset that
had some serious mileage to make or had imposed
the pressure of time upon the phenomenon of walking the camino

anyway
the way is lined with garbage
and human excresences

just so you're forwarned
should you dare to walk

the way