Don’t Go There

Don’t go there, she said, and I didn’t.
Lordy, though I wanted to.

I’d have followed her down
that rickety staircase to the cellar

of her memory. To the very
walled up ghosts whose voices

she can still just barely hear.
Nights, we didn’t go anywhere.

Lit up, hung out, just to get
so far away from there that we

could have been anywhere.
Or nowhere. It was always there.

But, more often than not,
it was everywhere.