Freedom
Budapest
July, 2015
I must confess I have taken a second croissant
from the table marked one coffee one croissant
at the old socialist Erzsebet Hotel
here on Kiraly Mihaly utca in Budapest
and that the second one tasted even better
than the first; all this after watching
the Communist-era film Witness about
Communist dike worker József Pelikán,
anonymously accused of slaughtering
a pig for food, and after a few glasses
of good Hungarian wine at Beckett’s Pub,
the wine much more expensive– and better–
than when I first came here in 1986, the street
filled with expensive restaurants of all sorts,
the women still as sexy and beautiful
as I remember them back then, when an hour
with a prostitute was little more than a glass of wine
and everyone looking for freedom of some sort
as I was this morning with my second croissant
which I can still taste in my mouth, all buttery
and perfect and quickly digested, like freedom itself.