Tuesday, June 28, 2011

The Tourist

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I'm a tourist! I'm a sojourner!
I'm galavanting through your heart with the rosy eyes of unfamiliarity!
You can tell I'm not from around here;
I am in love with even the cobblestones, and I've got a camera in my fanny pack.

Show me--won't you, darling?--all of the architectural thoughts I've never seen
the memories-turned-foundations of this city that I am foreign to.

Even the language barrier is a romance: you speak only male, and misunderstanding itself only reminds me thrillingly that I am here, in a new place...what more does a tourist want than to be confounded by the culture?

I may live here, eventually, if they will give me my papers;
I'll know the streets like my own hand

Until then, let me wear my sandals and take my photos and gasp over vistas for their novelty;
let me linger in the arches and pore over histories and taste the flavors so unpronounceable to me;
It is right and timely and good that this holiday should come in its season; the politics and dangers and mortgages of buying in this city will come in their time; the romance will shift its kind and effort... what I know about this journey is only:

it is right for me to be here.

this is the place of which I have dreamed.

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