Poems by Jakob Zaaiman on Medium

Eye to keep

A contemporary poem

Screenshot of Burt Lancaster in ‘The Swimmer’ (1968)

So like Burt Lancaster
In ‘The Swimmer’,
I somehow expected to have to swim walk
the long five miles back home
- on my own -
in the rain or in
the sunshiny rain,
and then to
have to face up to
a boarded up and
abandoned
and probably
uninhabitable
building.

Interestingly,
I don’t remember now
how I got back
that day. I have no memory
of the drive home that
there must have been.

When I tell people all this
they commend me on my ‘honesty’
but they don’t know what I’m talking about, because
- honestly -
this is not about honesty.

I had kids late in life
long after everyone else
- along with everything else -
and they came at a time when
- late in life -
everyone else had moved on
to…