Several miles overhead
I watch flying metal dragons
Smoky contrails trailing behind
Ascending and descending
Circling like flies attracted to an airport
On the other side of town
I read a story of a mystery man from the sky
Who fell in a garden patio
On a flight path to Heathrow Airport
The article told of a software engineer
Who watched planes from his deck
With a cell phone tracking app
He saw a man falling from a plane
Chased a police car to a neighbor’s garden patio
Where our mystery man landed half-frozen and dead
How the plane finished its flight and landed safely
That the shocked home owner graduated from Oxford
And his house was worth 2.3 million pounds
I read how they found a rucksack, bottle of Fanta,
Food, money, spare shoes and clothes
In the wheel well of a jet from Nairobi
How they were able to trace the bottle to a small shop
Near Jomo Kenyatta Airport and that
His finger prints had no match in data banks
I read how he might of survived
His nine hour flight
In a state of half-frozen hibernation
How seven teenagers in 2011 survived
In this state after capsizing a boat
in the -2C water of a Danish fjord
The journal related how every so often
An illegal Commonwealth stowaway
Falls dead in South London from the sky
And the UN estimates six people perish
Per day crossing the Mediterranean Sea
attempting to reach Europe
But no one postulated the quixotic reasoning
That led to his flight or whether his family
Still waits for news of his victory in Britain
And no one wrote of the conditions
That may have led our mystery man
On his heroic quest from post-colonial Africa
Clinging to the legs of a dragon
On a journey to an empire builder’s island lair
To win riches from Grendel’s mother beast
And no one cared enough to discuss
The cost to the world when a poor man’s hopes
Free fall under a balmy English summer sun
From the belly of a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner
Crash into a rich man’s patio furniture
And make a dreadful mess of afternoon tea
4-15-21
My husband's poetry 
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