Rio de Janeiro is where it’s at:
in our apartment large enough to swing one cat.
I wouldn’t call it particularly plush
and the ‘social toilet’ doesn’t flush
but it is two blocks from the beach at Copacabana.
It certainly rained and rained and rained last night:
the frozen cockroach in the fridge gave me a fright:
yet more heavy rain the day that followed
the skies it seemed had half the ocean swallowed
but we are two blocks from the beach at Copacabana.
There’s an upstairs neighbour with a hacking cough
and this morning the water was turned off!
No more tea-bags anyway for a cup of English tea
though you shouldn’t think of tea or diminishing sanity
when you’re just two blocks from the beach at Copacabana
There’s a cursing parrot swearing in fluent Portuguese
at the next-door neighbour’s window – if you please –
and two floors down some other kind of bird
with an eerie, cackling laugh that doesn’t speak a word.
Very funny when you’re two blocks from the beach at Copacabana.
There’s no TV and the radio plays incessant Brazilian pop.
Downstairs the porter thinks he’s a special kind of cop:
he gestures me to use the second, service lift
with this insulting, ‘macho’ movement of the wrist –
two lifts, two blocks to the beach at Copacabana.
Every apartment block you pass has a fire-armed porter
at the door or gate: some are tall, some are shorter.
our specimen is the latter and a little bald.
Come midnight he looks to be extremely bored.
Perhaps he sleeps there, two blocks from the Beach at Copacabana?
The disadvantages are numerous and multifarious
in retrospect perhaps I’ll find humorous or hilarious.
After all it is Rio, that bustling, noisy and exotic town -
though I haven’t seen much exoticism around.
But we are two blocks from the deserted beach at Copacabana.
Reading with visuals and music:
