From across the crowded passeig

your eye is drawn to the shimmer

of its otherworldly façade,

its bits and bobs of broken tiles

washed by tides of light.

 

Its carnivalesque balconies

and freewheeling contours

are like the feckless dreams

of those who have no need to prosper

by hard graft or deals.

 

Incongruous, then, the way

it rises from this city’s

remorseless grid, whose

well-intentioned plan

for quiet parks and walkways

 

was block by block

subverted, its breathing spaces

squeezed for rent.

Constricted, too, the cautious

lives of those who swept

 

from room to room

in that luminous ‘house of bones’,

where no expense was stinted

on iron, glass, wood, and stone

shaped to what the mind invented.