11-26-2023, 08:38 PM
Your Hometown
Paris is cold this time of year,
its streets bathed in red wine and
stale cigarette smoke.
Raindrops fall—
always drum-drumming melancholia
on tight auvents over doors to cabarets
full of cancan girls with hairy armpits and rictus
smiles.
A wretched hole where
grumpy faces roam the boulevards,
voices murmuring in pretentious streams of French.
Everyone wearing black and white stripes,
onion necklaces, black berets
and carrying armfuls of baguettes—
all off to the Panthéon to sit at Voltaire’s tomb
and weep
then write poems about affairs, unrequited love
and ennui,
before returning home to slash and burn
a misunderstood painting or two,
as sugar melts into a glass of absinthe.
Paris is cold this time of year,
its streets bathed in red wine and
stale cigarette smoke.
Raindrops fall—
always drum-drumming melancholia
on tight auvents over doors to cabarets
full of cancan girls with hairy armpits and rictus
smiles.
A wretched hole where
grumpy faces roam the boulevards,
voices murmuring in pretentious streams of French.
Everyone wearing black and white stripes,
onion necklaces, black berets
and carrying armfuls of baguettes—
all off to the Panthéon to sit at Voltaire’s tomb
and weep
then write poems about affairs, unrequited love
and ennui,
before returning home to slash and burn
a misunderstood painting or two,
as sugar melts into a glass of absinthe.