On Leaving Prague

“Prague is mad, so it is. And everything is weird,” you sing,
all hyperactive and sweating with the DT’s, pasty face

turned ashen, pink-grapefruit cupid’s bow growing blue mold
before me. Because for almost an hour you thought you were dying

as we sat in the square in Lesser Town,
sun burning the back of my neck between braids on this,

our last day here. Then thoughts of this month, this place
and the man who fell in the Metro – warm blood on my hands,

palm-sized sliced scalp, a flap at the back of his head. I still see
his sixty-eight, overweight body go to work on granite steps,

a jackhammer from ten feet tagging the wall with a spray of blood,
indelible I-was-here-graffiti.

And there’s that dull, flat pop still stuck in my head
like the sound of hundreds of lips pursing cherry lip gloss.

I want to see Lennon’s shrine again before I go and though
you look like the work of a taxidermist, face frozen

and stuffed, you come with me. On the way, my flip flop crawls
between two cobblestones, in cahoots and plotting to see me fallen

like a beggar. You get your jollies from blinking day-glo pussy
before fixing my skirt, peeling it off my shoulders to cover

the from-behind view of my penchant for going commando.
I round the corner to the shrine, destroyed

to find John gone, effaced by drunken scrawls in silver
and luminescent pink. Then your callous remark,

like the sound of peaceful protest, opens fire on the hush
of foreign feet out for a stroll and birds people-watching. It’s only

for the soft crunch of a snail and his home under my heel
that I have mixed feelings as I turn to march off, leaving you

to rattle around in the street, chasing up the walls of the slipway
and after me. Your lips, grey like snow clouds in February,

barely moving, manage to mouth something about sobriety and
“Berlin’s a great spot to drink coffee and be depressed.” Because

you’ve been poisoning memories, blacking yourself out
under the influence of what you call self-imposed schizophrenia.

On Charles Bridge, thick with tourists and daytime, we stop – I
resting on St. Christopher, you faced to the river, legs left

to dangle – and watch runaway clouds, defecting
to keep from being melted by the sun. Still anxious, you’re on the fritz –

flip – flick – arms and legs thrashing, a possessed marionette
who’s overthrown his master puppeteer, and you’re yodeling Morrissey

for the Eastern Bloc and the masses until you slip,
a shaggy blond rag doll in a black back pack and bad shoes,

into the Vltava River.