Some days, 
I’ll run around a walled city.

And inside a walled city.

Beside a Grand Harbour
and opposite other walled cities.

I’ll run beneath great walls 
that slope upwards
to battlements and gardens
where the branches of tall carobs
peek out over the turrets
and riffle like jazz hands 
in the soft breeze.

Walls built of large limestone brick.  

Smoothe walls.

Walls clad in scaffold.

Walls between whose bricks 
profuse caper bushes
like bristly, pubic thatch.

Walls mottled with age
and centuries of wars,
and each century’s
unique and savage projectiles.

I’ll see old Forts whose names resonate
with the clang of antiquity,
Elmo, Lascaris, Rinella, Ricasoli…

I’ll pass monuments
and museums for and to these wars.

I’ll run past walls within which are housed 
cavaliers, plump domes, 
church towers and spires, 
blocks of flats and palazzos 
all Tetris-ed together inside.

I’ll run on top of walls too.

Past gun towers and turrets.
Gun ports and pill boxes.

I’ll zig zag through olive trees whose leaves
catch the sun like the snakeskin surface
of the sea that surrounds. 

I’ll dodge dog turds by the dozen 
and oblivious tourists 
struck dumb by the view.

I’ll run on paving stones 
polished slick by centuries of footsteps.
and disperse crowds of pigeons that strut 
and coo in Maltese accents.

I’ll run inches from the water’s edge 
below Barbara Bastion,
from where, before this city was built,
a Great Siege was fought
and the Ottomans crucified 
captured Knights 
and floated them 
out across the water
as the decapitated heads 
of their own captured 
were fired from cannons opposite
and struck the earth there
like dull, ripe melons.

I’ll run ‘cos I’m in good shape.

I’m in good shape 
but I leak my memories
like rice from a hessian sack.

And time is a flashing cursor 
that trails history, 
like a comet’s tail behind it.

For many years now
I have studiously decanted 
observations and
memories onto the pages
of soft leather-bound notebooks.

I carry one with me everywhere I go.  

Their pages grow yellow 
with dirt and wear.

Yellow like these limestone walls.

Eventually I’ll shake ideas
loose from these pages.

Plant them in neat lines 
on my laptops screen.

And then I’ll run around a walled city.

And inside a walled city.

Beside a Grand Harbour
and opposite other walled cities.

I’ll run beneath great walls 
of large limestone brick
that shine like a laptops screen,
luminous, in the bright afternoons sun.

You might see me bottom right.
A flashing cursor,
trailing these sentences behind him.