I want to go there, she points, unhooked through propped elbows. A couple’s sticky technicolour serenity, warped between leaves of a holiday brochure. Cotton dressed and brown forearmed: cultured/at leisure/in love. You want to go there? I fondle and scroll,
sorting rooms by price near the Spanish Steps.
Ten years plus hence, stock Sunday penitence. A wife that’s not you, rotating in seasonal soil, with two buds to show: happy/house-trained/exposed in a box marked my stuff! Don’t touch! Unspeaking young strangers by those Spanish Steps.
She points to the couple, folded sharp in the middle. A Roman dark and hazy: smiling/nodding/leaning-to, a chalk cross on my back, an unfeasible alley, over petrified cat shit we gratefully scurry. Mugged at knife point. Hearts gagging our mouths. A good half mile from the Spanish Steps.
Me, concessionary bravado ringing your ears with polizia polizia. You, burning,  beseeching, pointing: still deaf now/then/forever, but ahhh, Trinità dei Monti, then the piazza and disposable camera captures us, blanched and voided, bled black by a shadow, enquiring cocaine? on the Spanish Steps.
Unfolding on creaking cartilage amongst aborted dump trips, sodden cardboard
packing my lungs, without regret. With no wish to regress. I want to go there.