It’s Monday, so it must be time for another Poem of the Week. Enjoy a little travel nostalgia.
paris poem
sitting in a café pretending I’m Hemingway
sipping and stretching out my café au lait,
acting like I’m scribbling away
about bullfights and war and Beaujolais
when really I haven’t got much to say
as I perpetrate my male gaze
on the beauty winding through the Parisian maze
trailing French vowels like a perfume haze
that leaves me grinning, dazed and crazy
to rendezvous with a certain French lady
waiting behind her four-digit code
at the top of an art nouveau abode
tucked on a dog-shit-peppered road
where I once smeared a turd and showed
up embarrassed and smelling commode-
like, most incommodious.
an unpleasant memory best laid away
as I’m pretending I’m Hemingway,
sneaking some bourbon in my café au lait
wondering how to pronounce Beaujolais
and forgetting whatever I meant to say.
Peter Ferenczi
Medico Musings 