Still there was bread on the plate, still wine,
while the streets filled with refugees,

and the French stepped over them
en route to patisseries, cafés—

Massive powers that be
what will be?

We smoke our pipes
to forget you

and mildly now we bide our time,
the violence and real cities

under siege

but also filled this morning

with coffee drinkers, office workers,
taxi drivers, boys on bikes—

again we came to rest
on the riverbanks

finding a bloodlight
flooding what we’d come to see.

~

How is it to have a body today
to walk in this city, to run?

To be strong and whole in daylight
is to be tapped perhaps for a blade

yet off into the air we’re sent
in flesh and kismet it is

if we’re in the right or wrong or right
school, office, market, concert, café.

Red velvet cells, the elemental oxygen
and pall of eyelids, fists, feet,

vivid apparitions of those who have jumped or fallen
in the jingle of no spring.

Existence is killing us.
I don’t want to see what can’t be unseen.

Nights we play the game of going to sleep,
expecting to wake up.

~

O you who want to slaughter us,

we’ll be dead soon enough, what’s the rush—

and this our only world.

As you can see it has a problem,

as you can see the citizens are hanging heavy,

the citizens’ minds are out.

Eros, Eros, in Paris we stayed all night
in a seraphic cocktail haze

despite the blacked-out theater, the shuttered panes.

Tonight we’re the most tender of soft targets,
pulpy with alcohol and all asloth.

Monsieur, can we get a few more?

There are unmistakable signs of trouble,
but we have days and days still.
Let’s be giddy, maybe.

Time lights a little fire.
We are animal hungry
down to our intricate bones.

O beautiful habits of living,
let me dwell on you awhile.

~

Summer seemed to hover
along the Seine

as we sat with our backs
to the street letting time pass,

lying all afternoon in the grass
as if green and insect were the world.

I am, I am, and you are, you are,

we wrote, until the paper seemed a tree again

and we walked beneath it
greener and unsullied afresh.

Golden we were

in the moment of conception

and alive, as if
we always would be.

~

It was good getting drunk in the undulant city,
whiskey lopping off the day’s fear—

dawn came with an element of Xanax,
dusk came and I dumbed myself down.

Where there were brides, grooms,

these bored boysoldiers with iPhones and guns.

I’m a soft target, you’re a soft target,

and the city has a hundred hundred thousand softs;

the pervious skin, the softness of the face,
the wrist inners, the hips, the lips, the tongue,

the global body,

its infinite permutable softnesses—

soft targets, soft readers, drinkers,
pedestrians in rain;

in the failing light we walked out
and now we share a room with it