DEAD MAN IN PARIS
 
Never was so bored, so at loose ends,
as I am without you,
and the strangers are no help,
with their foreign tongues, with their stares.
They'd rather collapse in the street,
clutching their heart thin bring news of you.
And the women shop for dresses,
though nothing you'd wear.
And the children play games
so alien to your childhood,
laughing and shouting words
I cannot understand.
Will nothing remind me of you
other than your absence!
 
Maybe I just haven't asked the right people.
Surely, English is spoken somewhere
other than in my head.
Why not the ones in the outdoors café,
sipping their supercharged coffee,
peeling their croissants like onions.
Or the messengers on bicycles
dodging in and out of madcap traffic.
Perhaps the lovers know,
the boy and girl lingering at the fruit stand,
wishing the peaches they fondle were each other.
Surely they could tell me that they've seen you,
that each time they kiss, you're here.
 
So I have the letter that arrived
at the hotel a week ago.
The ocean watered down the perfume.
Immediacy was lost when pen hit paper.
Why now, does it have to hit me,
that one soft touch is worth an entire career of words.
 
Should never have left home.
I'm being punished by travel.
Foreign countries have it in for me.
They speak another language
just to rub it in.
 
 
 
STORMING THE BASTILLE 
 
This is Providence she assures me 
but it could just as easily be Paris .
 
That's not Thayer Street surely.
It's the Champs Elysees .
 
And the twenty first century? I think not.
It's the 18th and the peasants
 
are storming the Bastille, the very second
you recommend we step into a favorite
 
coffee house for java and chat.
But I assure you Ii didn't come out today
 
for idle conversation, Brazilian brew.
I want to see history in the making.
 
The people on the sidewalk are oblivious as always:.
Brown freshmen seeking out the chemistry building,
 
street musicians playing and singing bad Dylan,
young men and women dressed in Gothic black.
 
Don't they realize, the aristocrats have been in charge too long.
It's time for revolution, liberty, fraternity, equality,
 
and the Marseilles piped into every elevator.
A couple at a table in an outdoor café
 
are ordering sandwiches named
for long dead writers. I kid you not.
 
Don't they know there's no bread.
It's eat cake or starve, declares their idol, Marie Antoinette..
 
My doctor, the old Royalist, is insistent that
my imagination is doing mc a world of harm
 
and I need to live more in reality.
Off with his head, I say.
 
 
 
MARKET PLACE FIVE P.M.
 
Dust & the crush of people,
tattoos so close, 
it's like the ink's on me 
 
& bawling infants, 
crates of hapless chickens,
a white duck swung by the neck
 
& there's the whispers
"hey American
stop I have just the thing for you"
 
& the beggars
with their hands under my chin
& the taxi I dodge
 
as its rumbles through
a cloud of cats
& three-legged dog
 
& the narrow alley
of hash dealers
& the broad slab of day-old fish
 
& trinkets
& hand-woven blankets
& a multitude of colored pipes
 
& hard-wood chests
shimmering in
the raw silk sunset
 
best be back at the hotel
by sunset
the bell-hop warned me
 
he might even have
a woman for me
if the price is right
 
but I stay here
where the bustle never stops 
where the mood feels 
 
like a woman anyhow 
& eels slither like veils
over painted brown doll eyes
 
& my fingers fondle
the hem of the heat the wind
& the three-legged dog
 
conspires to love me
without waiting to be paid
licks my knee
 
rubs his missing limb
down the fluttering
whites of mine