Land can make the man.
As I grew up
my father would always go out
on quests for property to buy
but never found something
to make him a landsman
and find his soul complete.

When my parents first wed
they were offered
as a gift
a home of their own
in some East River complex
but decided
on a bitchin’ honeymoon instead.
They ended up in Spain and Portugal
but with no real estate to see them through.
Is that why
my father would search the lands
for years after
looking for some way to begin his empire of earth?

Probably not.
He’d always been a restless soul
and he and mother
ended up settling
on the Upper West Side
for their six decades of domesticity
not owning aught
until their last few years.

And I think sometimes
of what might have been.
What if I came from somewhere else?
What if I belonged to elsewhere?
They could have lived in the East Village.
I could have been brought up
in the place
I still spend most hours.
I could have been a native
of my soul’s home
but my parents squandered such dreams
for a few weeks in Iberia.

Yes, I think sometimes
of what might have been
and who I might have been
under those different circumstances.
I ponder the future
and the past often
in my current slumhole
a borough away
in the Bronx.