The Emergency Alpaca

So one day you find you are a grown up.
All your best friends live somewhere else.
You carry a sense of doom in one pocket
And an indelible longing in the other.
You live in a major international city;
You are waiting on a subway platform
And suspect each oncoming train terminates
In your own middle age.
You drink too much, you wonder
If the kid who had her picture taken in sixth grade
Would have turned tail and fled from the frame
If she knew what sort of mess it became.
And being a grown up, you know in a way that aches:
There is no way it would become anything else.

“There is an emergency alpaca,”
You said to me. I can not only imagine you typing
In a South American cyber café; I have seen you there before –
Your little fingers rabbiting across the keyboard and
Smiles breaking across your face like weather.
I marvel what a wonderful idea this is,
Because the emergency alpaca is meant to bear you up
When the going is rough, when your head goes
All spinny with altitude, and I spend a few days
Thinking about this, and how hard it would be
To fit an alpaca on the subway.
In theory, I mean, you are my emergency alpaca;
No one surer of foot, truer of word or sounder of heart.
But when the distances get too wide, when these pockets are too heavy
I pretend I have just a little one
Living at the back of the linen closet
And I ride across all that divides us
To see your face again.