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It was our first night out on the town.
God, we were out of our minds
And totally lost.
I didn't know their language
And neither did he
So we begged of lines and symbols on a map
To guide us around this strange place
So far from home.

It was our first night out on the town.
We stumbled from cheerful hostel walls
Into a more colorful darkness
And started up again out of bed
Like confused ghosts slinking across the angular shadows
Gazing up at bizarrely intricate buildings
Whose very existences were due to a mind
Questioned to be prophetic or insane.
Jesus, cubically rendered,
Stared down still as stone from the rafters
Offering no protection.

(And as if to justify our vision,
Dalí sprang forth terribly, six feet tall from a wall
With eerie vacant eyes bulging from a chiseled gray face
That presumed only chaos.)

We wandered upon a line
And decided to wait, not caring where it led.
Trying to meld with the crowd,
We bought Estrellas, like the locals drank,
And talked in low English voices
Lest we become visible
To the line one hundred units long.

Realizing it was not so much a perfect line
As a writhing organic S
Of shifting ruddy faces that laughed
And cried and dropped to their knees in the street
And fell off drunken tottering heels
And chattered with sparkling eyes in a proud language,
And kissed and shared cigarettes
And recognized—
In each curve of their human faces a reminder
That we weren’t all that far from home.

- September 6, 2008