The Cartographer

My mother was a mountain goat

my father was a mule.

I was born in midair, kicking,

did disastrously in school,

fucked up my mathematics,

I bombed psychology.

The one thing I excelled at:

Advanced Cartography.

Just send me up a mountain 

and I will make a map.

I won’t take an old brass compass

or any of that crap.

I’ll just follow my gut instinct 

and climb into the crags.

I calculate it all myself.

I carry my own bags.

The only thing I like to take

when I climb from A to B

is a huge headful of acid.

That’s right - potent LSD

makes paths into mandalas

so I’ll see a Gordian knot

where you would see a straight line;

I’ll sketch a Mandelbrot -

a crystalline recurrence

spinning fractally away -

as I map each kilometre

of the good old South Downs Way.

They say my maps are useless

but I’m not sure that they’re right;

they’re just not for casual ramblers

who walk in broad daylight.

My maps are made for magic:

they do not describe a place.

It’s more a way of feeling,

of experiencing grace,

for you can walk between the winds

or through the roots of trees,

see a place through foxes’ eyes,

circumnavigate a breeze.

My maps frustrate all logic.

The systematic world

has no time for speculation

that the Cosmos might be curled

tight inside the tiny seedlings

of any given tree

that maybe when we say we’re lost

we actually mean free.

So next time you go rambling

remember what I say:

you find yourself when you get lost

so throw your map away.