When you don't seek and look
You find and get found
September 14 is when my future husband walked into my life quite unexpectedly.
Graduate school started
I was twenty-one
That is when my life changed
When you don't look, you find and get found
How lucky can you get?
My Prince Charming and first Master's degree

Suddenly, the 502s were back
those unexpected disconnects
that make posting whack
and my nerves a wreck

Like blank spots in time
that made me backtrack
unable to use rhymes
I felt trapped and  highjacked

Did the server choke on a bone?
Was 5G stalling me, wordless and postponed?
Did the firewall collapse, did DNS lapse?
Was it my laptop, was it my phone?

People watched me, on the metro,
as I frowned and moaned at my useless iPhone.
The issues seemed flagrant, I was becoming impatient
Was I some kind of nut? I was showing emotion.
We don’t DO that in Paris - have public implosions.

Did it happen to you?
Or was I one of a few.
What were the chances
that it only happened to poets in France?
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Song for this:
Alone Again (Naturally) by Gilbert O'Sullivan
La Vie en Rose by Allison Adams Tucker

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Paris settling in. My every appliance, gadget and charger have been bricked by the weird, French electricity, which bobs when it should weave or something - but you still can’t stick a fork in the sockets.

I’ve also been meandering the right bank* arrondissements for fashions. Students at Université Paris Cité, in the everyday, dress more chicly and elegantly than Yalies or nerdy Harvard ‘barneys.’

I’ve noticed a lot of Asian, selfie-taking tourists in Paris. They come in like waves of invaders as the river-cruises dock. Now, anyone that’s known me for some time, will tell you that my friends and I’ve been taking selfies for decades.

Just not in the middle of the street or with total strangers trying to relax on crisp, cool, early summer morning, while sipping an espresso hangover cure. Was COVID deadly? Well, it certainly killed off the last etiquettes that separated us from the animals.

I’m not anti-tourist - nope -  I just moved back here myself - but these smiling, terribly polite, middle-aged people, think nothing of stopping someone abruptly in the street to ask directions, in a foreign language - as if they’re at Tokyo-Disneyland where the locals are cast members simulating real life.

Would you expect anyone on a busy, work-a-day Manhattan street to happily stop and converse? Not a chance. Women would recoil like snakes and the men would dodge like O.J Simpson or shoulder you to the ground. Still, they call Parisians rude.

I am becoming more serpentine and evasive as I shop, as-if I were a spy in occupied territory. Charles and I form a one-man phalanx, with me following in his wake, like a dolphin trailing along a great ship.

They may need to put up signage, like, “Look (at the locals) but don’t touch,” but in what language?

Let’s wax free-versely… freever-ishly?

It’s a pleasure to walk the banks
of the dark, reflective Saine again.
and watch the warm, evenings for
the first cool stirrings of fall.

Once you’ve visited Paris, it stays with you.
Nothing’s simple here, not the moonlight,
the serene european atmosphere or
the better-than-you sense of right and wrong.

I’m young in a very old city.
I like dessert crawls, and “rock’n’roll clubs.”
Hemingway wrote, that
‘‘You receive in return what you bring to Paris.’

That’s probably not an exact quote.
but I think that’s where they got “What happens in Vegas.”
.
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Songs for this:
Come to Me by Koop
Leena by Caravan Palace
Right Now by The Creatures

Sadness is a bed I lay on whenever things get old. The shadow of me, someone who’s always been passionate about finding new places, familiar feelings, and nostalgic flashes, now watches with pure disappointment as things keep losing their magic. In recent days, no matter how much I walk around Chinatown, soaking up its noise, the smell of fresh coffee, and the hum of engines, longing for the comfort I once felt whenever sadness overcame my footsteps, it all feels old. I can’t listen to music, for it ends up being noise I cannot understand. I am no longer filling a void; I stand still in dread knowing, the void is filling me.

I wander the streets of Chinatown with a great echo in my chest, bringing injury to a place loud with peace, a hollow shell, desperately waiting to be filled. Six hours of endless walking, searching for the end point of my destination, seeking validation within the walls that raised me… and still, I am a broken prayer, a wingless bird without shelter. And so, I sleep endlessly, waiting for familiarity, waiting for emotion, waiting for my sadness and my joy to live in cohesion for I cannot have one without the other.

If you come back, if you decide to disturb my already disturbed depth, come back to me like a swan resting by my window. Come back to me like music and gentleness, something I have never known.
Come back like sugar that brings delight to my coffee, like flowers that bloom when the skies are dark, or like blackberries that ache to poison my bitter blood, beneath the present silver eye. And you may hold me under your knife and demand that I take a leap, though I bleed, I will stay.

Whatever you do, just come back home.

U.G.