How many relationships have been remembered, or explored, in the attempt to forge a perfect poem? Memory reminds you of your place. It doesn’t matter, now or then, who devised your initial reaction to the many sorry mistakes.
How many regrets, how many evil thoughts, forsaken sentiments or countless untruths have you counted on, or encountered, in an effort to scratch out your prose into a form another human may accept, yet allow you to go on living?
How many mornings, how many pencils, how much coffee, has been wasted trying to find the right word? Each purposeful letter you surrender to a page has been there, here, or elsewhere before. If only your cluttered thoughts.
No poem is perfect, even those from bards you envy or admire. They too had faults as countless as your own. It is through collective imperfection that we learn and continue learning. Without flaws we have so very little to write about.
Ravaged by rain tormented and tortured with nature’s harsh breath Skin torn away and hanging a mangled skeleton left for dead in the gutter an umbrella alongside broken bottles matchsticks and cigarette butts a spent condom salt and dreams washed away with the rain Items which once served a purpose now used or used up no longer of use Servitude sins and secrets susceptible to societal ways Disposable Obsolescence Everything once had a purpose or a reason or an excuse Now all but forgotten until it rains
Why don’t you meet me in Paris? Half a globe away, another lifetime. They write songs about the city, in April. I have never been. In any season. Spring has yet to find its way here, so Paris awaits. Rendezvous. City of lights, city for lovers. Should we not taste all Paris could be? Could we not see nights from a tiny apartment, streets below filled with people like us. Experience I do not yet know, but I desire to feel the city against your skin.
I have been told one night in Paris is like a year in any other place. Language I do not understand, but the art speaks to me. Culture not found anywhere but Paris. History unto itself. Art knows no boundaries, no geographic space, yet Paris, as I have been led to believe, is the capital city. Hemingway wrote of Paris, Fitzgerald as well. Picasso found poetry in Paris, the painter found himself, adopted the city, or it him.
Artists, from anywhere, are meant to spend time in Paris, to discover, to recover from wherever they have lived. You don’t get that feeling anywhere else. Or so I am told. I need Paris. I would write in Paris, I would paint, perhaps on the street, because I can only imagine what others have lived. I can only imagine. In Paris. In poetry. In April. We would meet in Paris. We may never leave.
