paris...
no american in sight, or how i just see utopia...
songs on the steps of sacré-cœur, kissing
an american girl, then cheese and wine
next to the Eiffel tower, laughing, joking, trailing
and tailing off with talk of nabokov,
the nightclub scene with ping-pong ecstasy dances,
youth, youth, youth,
of youth that congregated once in those places,
parisian girls congregating for a game french hushes
with the chinese whispers and anglo comic charades
learned from the conquering normans...
paris back then, what wouldn't i have given for it,
but i learned of starving north,
where lecture upon lecture repeated david hume,
and i said:
it's the 21st century after all!
make edinburgh the new paris!
oh paris, but paris stay intact,
with the eiffel tower in my palm,
where all love met no love
but love met love all the more fictive,
written with a million reincarnations
that once told a tale of warring fractions known
as factions,
and it was told so: paris of my past where
i walked the streets with the compass height
ordaining coordinates that the tower was
to thus learn:
in times of panicky sentencing est mort,
people congregate in hawkish gaze
at monuments of their bone and marrow
turned into cement and irons of scaffold,
and there they congregate to ogle a new hope
when encouraged by a new fascination
of those that are less amazed by the phonetic
simplicity of animals than those who keep them.
oh paris, how i too wished things would have
remained a truer you begging truancy
from international press coverage,
how that one summer i became embedded
in taking to sleep on rock that felt like
woollen napkins filled with duck quills.
and in the memoriam altar two boys played
this song: as entombed by the title.