Adelaide is still here

Oh, what a disgraceful encounter!
What did I do, what did you do during the year
to be ashamed like that on Christmas Eve,
the day —I remember— you dread more
than all the countless things you dread as well.
We saw each other walking on opposite sides of the street.
Your olive-colored eyes swiftly avoided mine,
as if I were the incarnation of all your regrets,
a naked madman stinking for miles, rambling,
wobbling towards you from a slum in your mind.  

We should have seen and ignored each other
somewhere else, the farther the better, let’s say
New York, Dubai, Shanghai, between impossible towers,
or under a shade so mysteriously fragrant, in Tokyo or Vienna,
that both of us would have thought: “Why, why should I say hello?
No, no, no. A dream is no place to be concerned with manners.”
And had you said hello, a foreign gale, a wind never heard before,
should have rushed to take your words away from my ears
to a desert, a cliff, a stormy sea or a rain forest inhabited by the angriest birds.

After all, you told me time and time again
that problems wouldn’t follow our trace
across the snow, among the fog.
It was you who claimed repeatedly
that heat and humidity were to blame
for your crying weekdays and your drunken weekends.
It was you who promised twice or thrice
that hang-overs wouldn’t be as gloomy in a distant nation.

And yet, you are still here,
here in this capital of junk,
listening for hours how trash never stops crawling over the streets,  
surrounded by rusty carcasses of buses without wheels and windows,
like remains of mechanical whales upon the dust.
Yes, here you are, looking for yourself in road puddles
where the city appears as horrible as she really is.
Here you are, desperately trying to convince your mind
that hope might be found if you stare long enough
at greasy rainbows over a sky of mud.
Here you are, close to the same river shores full of rags,
close to hats, shirts, pants, socks and shoes floating on water,
close, perhaps, to the corpse who used to wear them,
close to a mattress that sailed from a sewer
to reach the ocean sooner than your dreams.

I know you won’t, I know you never will,
but if you ask me what am I doing in the city,
I’ll tell you that there aren’t walls between her and me.
My body is one of her trees,
one of her anonymous buildings,
one of her many leprous houses.
My soul is just another ghetto.
I will carry her everywhere I go,
and so you will.
Move to Canada or France, to Italy or Austria.
It doesn’t matter.
The city will be where we are.
Her dying neon signs will be endlessly winking at you.
The rubber curtains at the entrance of the cheapest motels
will be waving goodbye while you are driven to the airport,
and will be moving behind your closed eyelids until you see their awful beauty.
We are children of her asphalt womb,
offspring of her countless cracks.

It doesn’t matter how far we are.
Your memory has forever clouded the world.  
Your name’s shadow is darker than any smog.
Sometimes I feel like a cross on top of a mountain,
condemned to wait for your embrace with painfully open arms.