It’s been a while since I looked at you
Properly paying attention to your traces
Of ancient histories two thousand or twenty
Years of them the same all in the past,
A gone multitude of moments I remember
Bathing in the river fountain of Navona Square,
Mock marrying an English fling in jeans under
The domeless Pantheon’s hole to heaven,
Serving joyous strangers by the Temple
Of Bramante near La Pace where we’d meet
At two, to challenge nightly silence sleepless workers
Confabulating cooks and waiters getting closer
Blasts of laughter, as we meandered the streets
Old ladies releasing buckets of cold water from high floors
We played pool, in the underground of the Esquire
After Harlem closed its doors, danced out
Endless sensual thigh to thigh to the rhythm
Of the DJ’s R&B record collection a last reefer
At dawn on the stalls of a trespassed Colosseum
When intimacy was exchanged under the stars
Amid the ruins of the Imperial Fora not too far
From where Cesar was killed Cleopatra ignoring
His fate and ours a couple of millennia later
As I cycle along the Tiber and witness
My beloved city Rome turn into an amusement
Park for travellers and times are changing
Effacing all the traces left of a past filled
With glory and unsmoked cigarettes.
[Featured photo: A night view on the Imperial Fora, Rome]