Paris Blazon

Your wink is a coin

lost to the undulating Seine

The tracer on a shadow in a Chinatown bar

On Belleville, your eyes are bullets

Your heart is a malachite bottle

smashed on the piss-river cobblestone streets of 4am

My hands

open themselves

on the shards as I puzzle them together

At 7am, I only pray

you haven’t melted into the gutters glittering

beneath the milky moon

You are my shivering night above spires

Your ribs

are the arches of the Saint-Germain des Prés, marrow

sucked out

and spat into the city’s open veins

But you laugh, your lungs gusty as the last windmill

Your feet are the Metro two minutes late

Your tongue the Metro a minute early

Your mouth a teapot full of blood

Your smile is a half moon

that lingers on

into the morning rising like fog above the canal,

the murky chamber pot of the night

a sun shower summoning steam from reluctant streets

a sun shower summoning me

to the tops of hills and down

winding mazes

Your pelvis is a toy gun

disintegrating at the bottom of a bridge

Your name

is the address of a house demolished and replaced long ago

You are the village vanishing down the city’s gullet

The slit of your spirit a cemetery open to the public

The pulse at the neck of the capital

I can touch you, but

you are in the passing glance

of each stranger, the woman

on each corner, the man

in each café

You are everywhere –

a ribbon of silver

smoke,

you are gone