Aeroplane why are your in-flight magazines all glossy

written for persons who imagine they reside inside seaside villas?

Your longroom is a cramped cinema, human abacus, a squat where

everything’s to hand, pretend confessional, makeshift kindergarten.

Your symmetrical windows lose track of East and West,

time of day becomes conjectural, almost like being in hospital.

Aeroplane your view stretches past wingtips to cold burn horizon:

clouds, that beneath the wheels promise illusions of soft lands.

It is reported that you can fly into rockfaces, pylons, or similar,

or disappear entirely from view, less than a speck in the sea.

Which is perhaps why you speak so lightly breezily easy

the captain and cabin crew delighted to have everyone on board.

Reassuring knowing infectious cheer will touch down before long

together with everyone else, huddled in square formation.

Having, thanks to you, experienced extensive frequent flight

perhaps passengers no longer wonder about being birds.

Joining the avians, behaving becoming them, is achieved:

one more dream to tick off on humanity’s to-do list.

Pineapple juice sharply acid in silver box foretells a destination

or chalky biscuits busting from zip-bag, tea in a one-use.

The national dish reduced to a cultic culinary cube

arrives with irons, via a waitperson attentive as a kangaroo.

Aeroplane, to watch your shadow dart across fields and forest

inexorably over rivers and glint, is to catch a minute’s content.

Your re-run romcom concludes in unconditional bliss (again)

a thousand miles left for you to move, your viewers not an inch.

As the lovers, a tubular belle and headphone beau, at last

hit the ground running, there to halt happily ever after.

Luggage, meanwhile, moves around abstractedly like the clouds

outside your symmetry, all with a mind of their own.

Tin feathers know the score through storm and super tailwind:

ranks of rivets hold you fast, a riveting ride.

For now you are quiet beers, muted orchestras on tap

lullaby corners, an aerial dormitory closer to stars coming out.