Joys.

GO NOT WITH RUINS IN YOUR MIND

Go not with ruins in your mind

Or beauty fails; Rome's sun is blind

And catacomb your cold hotel!

Where should-be heavens could-be hell.

Beware the temblors and the flood

That time hides fast in tourist's blood

And shambles forth from hidden home

At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.

Think on your joyless blood, take care,

Rome's scattered bricks and bones lie there

In every chromosome and gene

Lie all that was, or might have been.

All architectural tombs and thrones

Are tossed to ruin in your bones.

Time earthquakes there all life that grows

And all your future darkness knows,

Take not these inner ruins to Rome,

A sad man wisely stays at home;

For if your melancholy goes

Where all is lost, then your loss grows

And all the dark that self employs

Will teem —so travel then with joys.

Or else in ruins consummate

A death that waited long and late,

And all the burning towns of blood

Will shake and fall from sane and good,

And you with ruined sight will see

A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?

Cracked statue mended by noon's light

Yet innerscaped with soul's midnight.

So go not traveling with mood

Or lack of sunlight in your blood,

Such traveling has double cost,

When you and empire both are lost.

When your mind storm-drains catacomb,

And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—

Tourist, go not.

Stay home.

Stay home!

Ray Bradbury