TRIP TO ELTHAM PALACE POEM 18

I love maps. I love tracing the journey and plotting the route. I imagine each part and what the scenery may be like, as I make the route list. So I am a person that likes a plan. Courageous as I can be, this is a circumspect nature.

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“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves". Alexander McCall Smith

Plan

How can you touch me so

Without a plan?

A mission is not begun

Without a schedule,

A journey does not begin

Without a route.

To journey over my map

Is treacherous and to improvise

Is a technique I agree,

But one of music.

When a teacher provides the lesson

They have learnt rhetoric and discussed theme

And planned their discourse accordingly,

They have understood the subject

And their student before the lesson begins.

So I am most perturbed,

This insolence shall be punished,

For a map is necessary to know the use of North and South,

Are you the compass and measure?

And I the land?

“And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the thing it was a map of.” Mark Haddon