So strange to walk the streets of this city,
whose identity sings so much to us of the oppressed.
When the tanks rolled through the streets, and those days
when people were routinely disappeared,
from few, from hope, from imagination,
that’s how I learned to long for this city
as home for the pathos of fear.

Now everyone comes here,
more tourists than France, overrunning the bridges,
crowding the alleys,
where else can you hope, where else seems new?
Above looms the castle,
famous inaccessibility,
now home of a hope that already tarnishes,
five or ten years down the line.

You need the darkness to want a way out,
the threat of repression tells that you have something to say.
Without all that is the false hope of money,
and how excited, you tell me, can one get worked up about that.

That building stretches and dances, to atone for the bombing.
So many years later that no one can remember why it all happened.
The windows are irregular, the walls all pulled asunder.
On the roof is a metal sphere with bars peeling off into the air,
like frozen feathers, soldered of lead.

Only scrub down the façades that you want to remember,
to celebrate their times or why they were built.
Let the others stay gloomy, sooted in coal, dark memories
of the city that’s easier to take, more what you expect, so far
clearer than any abode
of possibility.

It’s years after the fall, and I still can’t describe it.
I never ran from the blast, I did not pull the trigger.
The avenues only float into consciousness as I learn enough
of the language so the map comes to life.

Was it true that once no one could get into the Castle?
Or is it only our whole inaccessible world that needed to be so metaphored?
We all pass through the frustrations when it seems there’s no way in,
not long after there seems no way out
of the lines no one else has drawn.  [9]