Art is good
medication so you'll
deal with this creatively.

You've careened into this so
make the wreck,
the chaos
bloom on a page.
It might even help.

You're going to be a comic book artist
because in the face of such things
words fail and lips
falter,  and you
want to knock your head comedically.
You want
to conjure silly star-loops for
smashing into this
feeling.
Knocked-out.
Reeling.
Draw, draw out
and ink in your malady.

Crash!

The worst is when
your heart is the caricature.
A full-page feature,
a splash,
of high-strung colours
begging to be neatened.

Splash!

Your
cartoon heart. An
image of a fat, crimson
apple
like a clip-art pic, got
a little worm poking through
it.

Eating, eating away
to leave a love
or loss-sized hole.
Fat white bubbles announcing
hurt!
so graphically.

Go on and
draw it more lurid. If
the feeling is here, you might as well
feel it.
Let the slops of gaudy red
and green
bleed and
bleed
out of the panel.
Stain it, stain
the gutter
where time happens.

At least it gives the comic
a heartbreaking!
twist.

And then you turn the page.

Paris: immutable
permanent marker
dream.

I love you like
the giddy sparkle-crack,
irrational love
found in picture-book fairy tales
I outgrew by
13. You are
my desperate idealism
romanticized into sepia wallpaper
on my laptop screen so
hi there.
Hi, Eiffel Tower.
I think I know your contours
better than a man knows the outlines of his lover but
Paris.
My feelings run
still.
Stiller than still, like
blood gone cold
in love's deep-freeze,
I'm fixated.

Paris, you've got
a residence permit
without an expiration
date
to live in the red beating
city
within me
where no boy has ever kept up his rent and
what,
           what
what does that say about me?
That I reach out my arms to
a rose-tinted Google image
rather than a
tangible embrace waiting for me at my
locker every day.

Why can I serenade you
but not even speak about him?

Paris, I don't think...
I don't think I should love you so
fairly.
For you are my soul investment
but we won't breakeven.
And they warned me,
Paris, they warned me
that you are most beautiful in the rain.
How gorgeous, how
dangerous,
in this age of acidity.

You do not need me
when countless 'artistes'
make love to you
on camera rolls, ivory keys, second-hand
typewriters of silk-faced men.
You do not need me.
Even history has shaped you
into an evenly symmetrical heart
on the map.
You do not need me
but I gorge myself on your
romance
to keep me sane.

Who needs therapy when there's the Champs-Elysées?

And I know that you're crumbling
like, God, yes, the pastries in your abandoned patisseries. I
know that you're crumbling
beneath pink candy wrappers and Casablanca
scene imitations so
that's why
they say you disappoint.

My aunt had a suite at the Ritz but
emailed to tell me
about the soot-stained post office
on rue-this or rue-that and
what,
         what,
what does that say about you?

Is that why they took
all the locks off your eternal bridge,
discarded each love-tale
attached to your hinges
because you were
                               heaving?
Vomiting out love because
it was over-indulgence, like
you'd stuffed yourself on red velvet cupcakes
to find you couldn't digest all that romance and
Paris,

I'm holding you tightly.

My feelings irrationally match
with some product with a price-sticker that reads
'true love'.
Did I tell you I cherish your flaws?
The smoke snuck on buildings and
vines like
veins
bleeding honeysuckles onto windowpanes
and brusque sandwich orders
in some seedy cafe.

I want to crawl
into your chinks and spaces,
make little dark coves
in each little gap where
I can sit and
read.
I can read.

I can read you.

Paris, you are
the postcard that never
came in the mail
but I somehow found
in an empty drawer one day and
I love you.

Paris, I love you.
I'm writing it now but
in some beautiful future,
I'll tell you in person.

Wanderer.
From window to window.
Seeking
             something
in different glass scenes
from offices and trains and restaurants.
Like she'll see something or someone
or somebody.
And the world will no longer be
a tilted painting.

Clear spring cold
papers over
the scene of the city of her world.
She's freezing.

There is a cafe at the end of the
road
where sidewalk snow has mingled
with trod-on mud
from commuter's shoes.
It's called
'Les yeux qui voient tout'

She can smell coffee and cigarettes and paper and words
and smiles and wine all the way from Bordeaux.
She sits by the window.

Tendrils of hair cut
across her cheek
as she lowers.
The seat is cold.
Legs crossed,
                       arms clasped,
high-heeled shoes with straps
that cross,
head bent
over a crossword.

'Un cafe au lait, s'il vous plait.'

Last four-letter word pencilled in so
she crumples up the paper.
The eyes don't notice
origami birds dangling above her.
Somehow
they're all angled
towards the glass window
like sunflowers reaching for the sun.
Perhaps the casual
shuttered-open winds
are the birds' oxygen;
reminders that
                          something
like
sky,
air,
wind,
exist, beyond
coffee-smoked counters.
Reminders that
they could breathe, live, fly
in some other city of some other world.

Cup and saucer on a silver platter
hover over.
Idle fingers
and then a clatter.
She stares down into
the white porcelain pit,
teeming with hot brown
                                           alarms.
It isn't a portal
into
       something.
Just a cup of coffee.
Now that is an alarm.

Slow and
                shaking,
drip,
         drip,
                  drip.
The milk is poured.
Curling, italic, Persian carpet spread
from the cup's centre into warm-cream brown.
She imagines it is
blood in her heart.

She raises the little silver teaspoon
napping on the saucer and
stirs.

'Le sucre?'
Does she want it all
to be
sweeter?

Two packets, long like
Marlboros,
hastily, desperately dumped
into the mix.
Quick and
                  shaking,
she raises the little silver teaspoon and
stirs.
Little sugar grains ******
into a vortex,
dissolved and melted into
the city of the world of the cup.

With her little finger, she
dabs
stray sugar grains
on the table
and tries to bring sweetness
to her sleep-thick tongue.

Slow and
                shaking,
sip,
      sip,
            sip.

She's­ tricked herself
into feeling warmth.
Ticker-tape banner
pops up in her head:
'All of this will not
fix you.'

Porcelain clatter
as cup meets saucer.
Again.
She arms herself with
a cigarette case and a book.
Maybe now she will belong
amongst these people
with sad eyes and burning lips,
clinging on to cups and drinks.
So desperately-lit smoke
trails out of
her warm mouth,
steaming up her face
like a window on a cold winter day.
And meanwhile Camus perches
in her hand.

Her eyes swim
in the choppy seas
of French.
The cigarette dangles,
painting the air grey, grey,
tilting, tilting, tilting.
Slow and
                shaking,
she weeps.

Half-aglow in the white sunshine filter
from the glass window,
a woman is wondering.
She drinks her coffee,
wipes her smudged mouth
and leaves.

Nobody notices the wobble
in her high-heeled gait.
She's just a part of
another tilting painting,
another glass scene.

These simple acts,
           simple things,
define
the speaking soul.
In a scene of the city of the world.