Monday, January 14, 2008

no smoking in paris cafés?!?

oh mon dieu.
what's next for god's sake?
no writing on napkins?
no gesticulating?
no crossing your legs slowly under a table and knowing what you mean by it?
no g minor chords?
no fog on the avenues?
no moaning after midnight?
no self pity, self loathing, self indulgence?

no smoking in paris cafés... wow.
surely then no four hour cups of tea.
no extralong letters home.
no watching the same woman walk by twice, three times.
no going home with her before the fourth time.
no saxophones on rooftops.
no dancing in the aisles.
no standing to dance.
no playing more than one encore.
no jumping a fence.
no picnicing in their yard.
no smoke curling up completing your thought just that slowly.


let's think about this
ain't there no place away

i want to hear words like notes
strokes along the fire

a long slow seduction on an autumn night
when autumn was still autumn.
(more g.brown cuz he's playin' and he'd understand)


we used to walk into grocery stores in our barefeet.
we shocked the europeans with that one.
but we felt so free, so young.

what's the point of this?

i'm long over smoking myself. i hope.
not much to defend it.
but for a frenchmen's long drag on a filterless,
the woman done crying, thinking it through with red lipstick wrapped around deep smoke and a decision, the sixteen year old dippin her feet in adulthood still drinking the single citron presée she could pay for,
The hippies rollin' in the rain - the trains still hours from leaving...

more goodbyes to you, old world.

1 comment:

Bicycle!Bicycle! said...

because everyone now is sitting there with their coffee and surfing on WiFi and the smoke hurts the laptop? yes, their smoking is way sexier than ours.

that was a very evocative post and a nice read for first thing in the morning with my coffee, hitting all my favorite sites before i have to head to work. thank you.