A bit of Paris, Ticktacktoe & November Night with Shklovsky and the Buddha

A bit of Paris

As a lonesome traveller it’s lonely,
The whole world a motorway
In front of me; rhubarb-soft lights
Shine singly in the midst of dark;
And counting, one, one, one by one, totting
Up a tally of passed lamps, swallowing
Into that behind-darkness.
I miss Lucy immediately, my Parisian
Beauty, cocktailing in Bastille after sushi;
And sat where Sartre sat sipping hot chocolate,
The world’s best, dans les Deux Magots.

This bus driver’s a cockney charmer
On our way back from Victoria; an
Humorous fella amusing all our bed-
Fellows on the National Express coach.
But yesterday it was Shakespeare & Company
On Rue de la Bucherie and coffee in the café
Opposite Notre Dame Cathedral, where
Beckett and Joyce may have been,
According to the unscholarly book of their Paris.
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Wake Up
Jack Kerouac and Scandalous Tales of Sisters
In Law, I to the Louvre alors! Venus and
Mona in that triumphant museé, sacrebleu.
(Buildings are staircases and dominoes; in
Londres now). Aleatoric life; is whim,
Is wind, b-l-o-w-i-n-g.

Paris, that romancestrewn place, with people
Like paper on a pavement, everything allowed
Is quiet, is subtle, is superb and tranquil.
So we stood, so far from bones which, once
Wrapped in flesh; and a skull that had housed
A wonderful brain; they that wrote Endgame
As one, one and the same. Composite
Of flesh, blood and all the rest in Montparnasse.
To Bath now for lucyd dreams of distant (near) things.
In Paris shhhh… Hard to write that city in
Anything but a whisper, beautiful people, beautiful places
And cadences of language; interwrapping
Words and roses that is a polaroid Paris.


Ticktacktoe

In the smithy sprigs of memory flame amongst the embers,
divine lights of a yesteryear phantasm, coiling and revolving in entropy;
I can paint a pretty picture with literature of the dismaller thoughts of
a philosopher.

Pessimistic-tac-toe, the slow pitter-patter dissemination, then back
up again; facing up to the Lord, the Lord’s face, a disgrace, a dishevelled
rum-soaked bum, wino with a beard, knotted; allotted many times of day
from any and every which way.

Is there a God there? Without evil and miracles, rituals and sacraments?
The orange in a cemetery, rolls on, rolls on, rolls over the dead and peels
in laughter at alack a father, an attack on forever; a postulate we impregnate
with all of desire.

Theologian in direct free discourse of discoursing free direction determination,
abomination, aplomb of the egg-sucking sheller, seller of money, of out and
ousting , our fasting, our fausting forefather Adam selling soul, shelling shield,
shedding arms with his ribs.

In youth, O Lord, give me youth, for I did not know you in youth,
and I will trade blood and ouns, O Lord, to know you no more! Memory stands
to me, stood, scoffed, ticktacktoe, unknown, unbeknown, offset and pre-postulous
you patulous repudiator of Spirit. Spit at you, O false prophet!


November Night with Shklovsky and the Buddha

Distant sounds of fireworks
As if the rumbling of my tummy
On some November evening
Sat alone.

Under no tree, but a roof,
In four walls of restraining
Order, and the chaos in my mind
Oscillates.

A pork chop beefsteak ballroom
Dance of cigarette smoke and
Irish Cream, back to the Futurists;
Shklovsky in the evening.

In dreams particles partake of
Placement in portmanteau legislature,
In wakedom each little piece is popping
By pinpricks.

Daft, dunce; the floccinaucinihilipilification
Of antidisestablishmentarianism.