Double the Trouble

My Parade Ground

In one sweet autumnal comedy last
 Before annual fire of winter's clot
Reburied that city and bound it fast,
 The mounted royal splendor liked me not.
Despite the best intentions a pup's got,
 Those folk held their strictly private charade
Law at season's end, so I spent my pot
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

The chromes, still glossy, tell my sorry past
 Like a bad movie still more badly shot:
Backs avert, voided landscapes leaved and grassed
 But sans humans -- who'd clearly fled the spot
And had dandylioned another plot
 With that stupid tourist rising the grade.
Off season? That'd be good by me to trot,
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

Heads, noses high, as if caught by foul blast,
 Blocked my view at finish line; looks to rot
A stranger into my viewfinder were cast;
 Then, a lone beret at cafe to blot
Familiarity with a green dot.
 The final roll -- empty streets high in shade.
Last insult: I underexposed that lot,
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

Six months before, a breakaway'd ended,
 And that week, the country debated, blow
By blow, how relations would be mended.
 I told myself, (ahem) I'd be a show
Of solidarity waving, although
 My parlez-vous summed zip. What I displayed
Instead was how a dimwit blows his dough,
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

Yet, I watched, I learned and then appended
 What I found to my store of facts in tow;
They, the same: our workdays passed and blended
 My bank's regrets with their wants in escrow.
Some followed my advice from column's row:
 "Give time to travelers who with you've stayed,
No matter the season -- I did, you know,
 Playing the fool in my only parade."

Twenty years clicked: an article wended
 Its way to national view -- this is so --
That one city'd "successfully fended
 Off its country's economical woe
With a steady stream of foreign cash flow"
 From year-round pilgrimages tourists made.
I'll take applause for my work years ago,
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

Princes, hire no clown in part-colored gown
 To ply you with jests while on promenade;
My eyes stay open to what's up downtown,
 Playing the fool in my only parade.

Copyright (C) 2012 William Mark Gabriel. All Rights Reserved.


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The events actually are from the only vacation (apart from just staying home and sleeping in) I ever had, in 1980. The "article wended" was on the 'net in either '00 or early '01. I wrote the above earlier this year after spring cleaning turned up some old Kodachrome slides. While reviewing them, I recalled that I had been warned by a friend that the week in question was the worst possible for an Anglophone to visit this particular place, but I -- in my infinite 26-year-old wisdom -- thought I knew better. The work above is -- or at least tries to be -- a pastiche of Byron. I don't know if he ever wrote double ballades (this one, technically, isn't one, either -- I had to cheat on the rhyme), but the famous verse form of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan is similar.

BTW, I still think fondly of the place I visited way back then -- especially its wonderful Old City -- where, stupidly, I took no photos at all. (The trip wasn't a total loss: their TV shows were better!)