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Anais Vionet Mar 12
The Eiffel Tower stabbed at a midnight
as blue as an old Muddy Waters track.
From a distance, its lace-iron skeleton
looked like a slick and oily spider-web
crowned with a glittering neon diamond.

(My Grandmère's home is across the street from it).
“Do you want to go climb it?” I’d asked Peter (my bf).
“Naah,” he’d replied, “too crowded - what’s next?”
We’ve been tourist-ing all of the big Paris sights.

As we night cruised the Seine, the rivière looked dark
and perilous - a phthalo-green snake slithering north
westerly at six times the speed of the Nile.

We took a guided tour of the Louvre - it’s a crowded
fortress and you can’t see the Mona Lisa up close.
We day-toured the palace at Versailles, with its ghosts
of past grandeurs and revolutionary, royal beheadings.

The Arc de Triomphe is just an unsafe round-about.
As we Uber’d around it, I turned to Peter saying,
“Joke time: What’s more dangerous:
a shark or an American driver in a Paris traffic circle?”
Paris la nuit = Paris at night

Muddy Waters was a singer and musician - a delta blues man, considered the "father of Chicago blues." Chicago blues was electrified, hard driving and drum backed. The Rolling Stones took their name from one of his songs. He was the original “Hoochie ******* Man."
noura Jan 2022
I am tired, and I am tired of making it beautiful.  Petals flung over the edge do not soften the fall. Adjectives do not halt decay. Spinning corpses in sugar is a sticky, pointless ordeal. If I let the moonlight paint me in all her violet shades they begin to look more like bruises. A single star, a gunshot wound. I think about how small I must look from all the way up there. I think about how I won’t live past twenty.

It’s such a dramatic scene, a fanciful notion ripped from the history books by a girl who doesn't know how she’ll fit into them. There was one like her before, who dug her palms into the rails and stared out at her burning Versailles, and she wondered how it could be so cold when there was so much light. Another kisses her daughter and son’s shining cheeks goodnight, sits on the tiled floor of the kitchen with her head in the oven. There was the one who painted and broke, loved and broke, painted and loved and shattered and broke. The other flies all her life and goes down at Howland, sinks for its remainder. All of them, statues with shards of rose colored glass transfixed in their eyeball sockets.

Maybe we were made to be romantic and lovely and tragic. Maybe we have no choice but to carry these diamonds and bleed from the backs of our ankles, streak the pavement rose red. Maybe we were destined to scar everything we touch, for what is beauty without pain?

I’ll paint my nails and bite them to the beds, I’ll **** boys who are cruel by design. I’ll spin endless corpses, spin relentless circles in this frigid corner of mine.
I walk the halls
and marvel at the traces
the ghosts left behind;
their faint laughter
and passionate
love affairs in the dark

their dancing and music
their finery and cries
their pain as end of an era
comes closer each passing day

I wonder how it must be,
a ghost in the world,
stuck within your time

— ghosts of versailles, stuck in your time of parties and fun // a.
4 janvier 2020
04:29 am
this is based upon a trip to Versailles, and how it’s not so empty and beautiful and it just made me think of what is it like for the ghosts that still haunt it— the memories and emotions about it.
Leo Feb 2017
versailles has been waiting for your return
this time you will be reborn
out of bitter tears and infant screams
you have been baptised
and now the light of apollo will be in your eyes

the squinting girl will return
but now you are a lion-heart boy
and the twelve years that have passed for them
is twelve hundred for you!
versailles has been waiting
and you will go back

— The End —