some places get under your skin
like the ink of a tattoo;
they force their ink into you,
so beautifully-- you think only of
how lovely it will be

to be here, love
to be lovely here
the taste of the sky, the length of the cathedral shadows
the cigarettes we smoked around the fountain
the plaças that we ruled with our infinite youth--
all this
i am leaving.
my own skin, i am leaving it here
to soak in the sunsets on the beach, to wander the tall stone alleys
to drink coffee on the ramblas
to dance drunk in steamy crowded rooms

barcelona,
i leave to you my heart.

my mother does not believe in things that hurt her.
bad dreams
sad things
brain chemistry
i wonder
if she just has her eyes shut
or if she's opened them
and we're the ones in the dark.

i feel restless and i pace the apartment,
i want to dance
i want to scream
i want to throw these glass bottles
off the balcony
i don't want to do anything. the music's playing and it's
good, very good. everyone
is sitting with their laptops, as if
             they aren't listening. maybe i should take something
                          just to calm down, to
get on their level.
no, i think, ride it. feel things.
feeling things is good,
right?

everything narrows into a tunnel and
                       explodes.
whole body, buzzing.            the air vibrates like it can't decide
where
             to
                       sit.
what is breathing? what is thinking?
tickticktickticktick

they're all
dancing

it's too much.

not all loss is intolerable.
there is a feather caught in the fan
whipped round quickly

--some loss leaves you with no breath,
tied to the bed in a tangle of knotted regrets
falling into the hole where there once was
something.

you are fine.
you are not caught in the pull
of a sinkhole. wake up.
shake the mud from your eyes, kid.

it will happen again.

i hate ice cream.
but when i was a child, ice cream was my mother's
band-aid
apology
celebration
reward
treat
synonymous with a cool rough hand on my forehead
far away now, in brown-dusted
cactus-studded hot hills
in baking cobblestone streets
between tall crooked stone buildings
i'm reaching for her hand
it melts sticky under my fingernails
and the taste is wrong in my mouth.

i told my mother
this place haunted me in my sleep
feverish
sweet-syrupy, drowning in other people's memories

he reminds me of someone a long time ago
small and broken
tough, i even remember
that other person saying
if he ever got a tattoo, it would be a smiley face
on his arm--
exactly the same as the one this boy has.
he wakes up with the dust of last night's numbness
in his eyes, washes it out first thing with a warm beer
and stumbles around the ***** glasses, tripping
over the bits of broken rules on the floor, fumbling
for a slightly crumpled cigarette.
he says good morning when it's three oclock in the afternoon,
because bedtime was nine am, and creatures only come out at night--
because he feels safer in the dark,
because there's something
inside him that cracked once
and will never grow back, something inside him
that i bruised and made him give to me, made him hold me
as if i were the damaged one.

i know these small dark spaces so well--
i sleep right next to them, try not to roll over
and fall in. these cavities dark like
dilated pupils, huge and haunting, pulling the light away
i remember this face but i don't know
where have we met? you couldn't be the boy i knew
and yet
you're so familiar.