Paris (NaPoWriMo 2)

We emerge from your
Underground birth canal
Blinking in the light of history
Needing to be slapped
Born again as
People who have been to Paris

We know nothing
Get lost in your spider web streets
Distracted by
Living black and white beat poetry
A corner cafe where a woman dressed in black smokes a long thin cigarette
And another woman

And Paris, I swear you are telling us jokes
The smoking women
The baguette businessmen
The Moulin Rouge Starbucks
Salvador Dali
The claustrophobic rabbit bar, hot and
Thick with beauty and
Nothing to drink but syrup-sweet alcohol and sweeter music in
A language we don’t know
And how could we not fall in love all over again?

And we do fall in love

Somehow, and you know I didn’t expect this
Your Tower beats it all
Silent witness to the bourgeois theatre
More than the sum of her parts
Steel trusses and old magic
Manifest poetry who holds me in her ribs
Lets me hear her breathing and see the world through her eyes
All curves and climax

We bring champagne and biscuits in our backpacks
Even searched for little plastic flutes
We are proud of our ingenuity
Until men grow from the shadows
Almost invisible until they present their sparkling bottles of bubbly
for sale complete with glasses
I suppose what else could anyone want
But to raise a glass?

‘Now just watch this,’ you whisper
And Eiffel starts sparkling
A million twinkling lights do the can-can
And our eyes alight with champagne choreography
And everything is effervescent
And we forget to breathe
And we get maybe ten moments like this over a lifetime
And we know it so
We do not move
Holding hands
Hoping beyond hope
Some day when
The world is ugly
Again

We will remember you