Before the Euro, you were -- swirling light, sitting pretty.
We kicked it at night along the grungy lanes of Ile de la Cité.
Notre Dame loomed large and long, a battleship on the Seine.
An exoskeleton of Gothic bones, what could it ever do but win?

Hunger hung out among us, an unwanted dog on a wayward walk.
Frenchmen directed us au centre. In those days, I could talk the talk.
Still can, still do, but who needs "J'adore vos diamants de luxe,
calme et beauté" when you must bow down in a row sans your ducks?

Serendipity, man, that's what la Cité seeped. Evening an ermine
blanket tossed effortlessly over the spires of the medieval vermin
that Haussmann hacked into Euclidean lines of parallel charms:
more ordre, beauté et calme. Organic geometry. What's the harm?

Dusk draped us in l'amour du mystère. Cafe awnings as exotic
as Flaubert's Egyptian tours, plump with mistresses for the neurotic
novelist who poisoned Normandy with naturalistic despair. He's
no Parisian, no architect, no monk. We absorb le mot juste; a star flees.

On the sidewalk, a 50-franc note calls out beneath the weeds.
We look for an owner, see nothing, feel nothing but the need to feed
on crepes, chocolat et confiture de fraise. I imagine Camus and Sartre
at Les Deux Magots, nursing black café, pouring noir into your heart.