Then and There

You move to Paris
With a suitcase of shirts
And trousers one winter coat
Socks and undershorts
Another case of hardbacks and notebooks
You spend Juin Juillet and Août
Parading strolling and in
A café off Blvd des Batignolles
Where the waitress knows
Your order
Late one night after buttered roast chicken
Stuffed with rosemary breadcrumbs
And a baguette you go to
The café for a nightcap and she has
Finished work and sits on a table
With her thin hand she calls you
Over and pours you un verre de vin rouge
Your first conversation lasts till closing
Leads to you
Walking to her apartment and you
Don’t try grab her ass or
Kiss her you ask her if she
Wants to have dinner the next night
And on her arrival
Just after you’ve taken her
Coat she kisses you

Her English is impeccable
(Childhood summers spent in Oxford with her Aunt)
Throughout the meal you reveal why you
Came to La Ville-Lumière
A plan of opening a book stall
At a Marché – you’ve got books
Knowledge but you need
A bookseller

She doesn’t stay that night or
Get in bed but she quits
The café and moves in each night
The both
Of you read and you share information
About authors and their lives
In a few months you get the stall and like
You’d imagined with a pretty
Madame on the stall you cover all your costs and
Pay yourselves within a year
There’s the engagement and you move from the
Stall to a small shop near the café
You met in business gets better and more
Parisians start reading in English
You marry in her hometown church
And on the wedding night
Conceive the first child who will grow up
To be un écrivan

Fair's Fair

Laces tied up
Pits and toes
Powdered
Tan tights
First time panties
Trimmed pubes
Matching bra
Perfumed neck
Dusted t-zone
Lashes licked black
And long
Nails cured and varnished
Pouting and puffed
Rehearsed smile
Pulled and combed
Sprayed and shampooed
The dress she pulls over
As her date dies

L'additon

It's the eating
Not the ordering

The answers
Not the questions

Autumn daylight savings
Pints in Mulligan's
Paris Birthdays

An afternoon snooze
Gaga playing piano
With her toes

Tax returns
Shared laughs
The day after sex

Chimpanzees picking
Fleas

Exciting comforts

Clean pillows
Full fridges
Christmas in Ireland

Being a flâneur
Dishing out advice
Scrambling eggs

Coffee and toast
Knowing I've made
A difference
To someone

Special souls
Can count on
My support
And voice

Mother's who've escaped
Poisoned men
Siblings getting the grades

These tiny things
Add up

A Handful

Phonebook whores
Bra strap interruptions
Scratchcard necklaces
Pig leg tennis rackets
Singapore stopwatch
La vida es sueño
Ornery brother
Night dream
Hangover house

Overdue?

Renowned Tanners

Xenarchus told us in the 1st
Whores would strip and bathe

In 10th century Britain
Pale showed you could afford
To stay at home and not out

Niels Finsen, the benifactor of the coveted
Nobel Prize for the benifit
of sunlight bathing

A tan is a sign
Of health and welath

Coco C circa 1923
Had been on her yacht
In summer

The look caught on
and since
We have 'em all year round

But not in Iran
Women can't do it there

Posing

They shake their dusty rugs
Out of 7th floor apartments
Off Avenue de New York

And as the Eiffel tower sneezes
I hide in passage souterrain

Up on the surface
There's an explosion of tourists
Fat and similar

One with a bad t-shirt takes holiday
Snaps of his son
Holding a smoking cigarette
By his lips and an expresso
In his right hand

By Pont de Bir Hakeim
Brando's ghost
Follows another

They wave dirty rugs
Out of apartment
Windows

De Attrait

Down Metro Louvre-Rivoli
There's glass benches
And up there on hot rue's
Topless drunks
Misogynist cabine's
Morrison's expatriate hangout
Ghost writers drinking from haunted
Cocktail glasses at Pont Royal
Algerian socks
Eyes bar
Styrofoam snails
The Baci marche where P.P
Bought still life apples
Beef cheeks lettuce heads and
snacks
L'hotel where Wilde popped
And passed
On Mouffetard
Hem got wrecked and wrote about men
Without women

Passer De Travers

Seeing your sacred heart
and cars
Coming the wrong way

Caused comfort
And joy
To choke

At the city
And it's magie naturelle

Bumps and Lumps

Sitting opposite the 3 Euro Shiatsu Master
Oh, Nostalgia
Close those legs
Sober up our familiar lives

Remove comfort
Rub out lust

You have a remarkable
C u n t

Getting Some

It holds form but lift the lid
Take a look

It’s like under a rock
Or a redneck garden

It smells of old milk and meat
But soldier’s, gym instructors,
Full-blown artists possessed by
Caprice egos

They find it and know
It’s not theirs

It’s just timing
And sentences
It’s walking and doing things
You don’t want to

See those widows
That repeat the same day
Those deformities

See the poor with their kids
They’ve got it

See the diseased, the fatties,
The misogynists
They’ve got it

The unhygienic
Sexually promiscuous
The beasts

Them too

Isn't it nice

Rue d'enfer, hell to some
Historically
lost enfants
Starved of le lait
De sa maman

Isn't it nice to know you
're still alive well
Still interested in
Livin'
possibilities
Endless

Out of town

The heeled whore called me
Bad Boy

But leave this
Capital
For another and
You’ll forget perverts
And sodomisers

A stable job
Where you don’t get
Jizzed in
Or on
Is better than sucking
A variety of cocks
And using mouthwash

Swap dirty money
To be legit

Left, right and centre

There's wedding anniversaries
And birthdays and other stuff
9/11 and 7/7

Then there's the 10 year celebration
Of a fine album of rock n' roll
Rated R by Q.O.T.S.A

In tribute to that time
I'm turning the clock back
I am not living now
This is the year 2000
And we play the album
and drink
Laugh and practice rhythms
Light up
Leave beer cans on the table
Pop x on trains and dance
With some guys girlfriend

Monsters in your parasol
Fading
Summer
Lost arts living
Legs
Chemistry
Quick and to
head lightning

Someone lost a headache

Play this
Repeat and feed it
To the the hungry

Out of the bag

A rainbow in Bourgogne
Lost white sock Carwash
Leprechaun's chewing PK gum
Ubiquitous
cock grafitti empty
Seats on a bus to Naples
Dinner on the moon
Lit terrace toast
Thrown out a 3rd floor window
Cumstained hotel
Bedsheets
Battered mothers
Repressed and bi polar artists
Walking in thunderstorms in the south
of France football fans
Sleeping at the airport
American women living in Argentina
Open mouths catching flies
Couples in sunglasses
Arguing outside a fast food restaurant clouds
In the shape of brains and bibles dropping
off a New York Skyscraper
T-shirts from heaven
The guy who forgot
To turn off
The gas mosquito
Bites on ankles and elbows
Remade retake cover version
Who'd play you in the movie?

Girls with the names of donuts
Prison husbands
With their hands on plastic glass
The serial killers get more visitors
Than you'd expect
Their mother's still write
Kids play cards and slap the table
I just threw a pen at a wall
and I miss you when I leave fatty
Tourists with wild wallets
Little girls show their knickers
Like drunken barwhores
Wet on the way
to Work
The diamond Burton
Bought had been stolen from Vera Krupp
Collecting cigarette butts
In Piccadilly Circus
Miller and Satre lived in the Louisiane
On Rue De Seine
They cut it into fourteen quaters

The interstice