Adios Madrid

Gracias for your beggars, ubiquitous as fear.

The atonement of hand-washed tiles in the Metro.

For tomatoes, scarlet with passion.

Pocket-size dogs bred from a pinpoint of invisibility.

For plazas of victory and defeat

repeated in your bourgeois streets.

For spare and quiffed shrieks of

Modernity in the spaces set aside.

For nightlife, candle-light, sangria, Juan Gris

and the endearing umbra of the strawberry tree.

Gracias; I won’t return

to taste the smile of someone new

glimpsed in the final kiss you blew.