Paris

Here, where only doors

Open and close

All is strange.

I hear through the walls

Sirens. For we are the children

Of science. We defy death

And live on our own.

Taunting laughter

Voices voices voices

Now loud, now soft

As someone makes love in the distance

I listen.

Meanwhile, doors open and close

Forever.

Among long corridors.

I see the street below

With its zebra stripes

And its elephant skin

And machines roaring

And chirping

Dreadul parrots.

Still the doors open and close

And latches click shut.

Soon it grows dark

The sun abandons us

Careless lover

Moving to other planets

Other bodies

While they only open doors

And shut them

As I listen.

Deprived of sight

By blinding light

I only smell

Fish and meat.

In this city of cannibals

I am no Tiresias.

More doors open and shut

And echo in the silence.

The day completes its loop

And I am locked out

Like always

Like I was there,

I am here too, a stranger.

Among a strange people.

And forever the doors open

And close.

And I hear.

Rituals

In the evening

The lights come on

As darkness appears

And we silently make our way home

For in the evening that is what one must do

That is what our fathers did

And before that the caveman that hunted in the forest.

That is what they said we must do

Because,

 because then everything remains normal

The T.V. blares on

While we make dinner

‘How was your day?’

Conversation

To fill the silence

While we pick at animals

With forks and knives

And pretend we’re civilized.

And eat neatly cut vegetables and leaves

Homo erectus in silk and cotton

These rituals

Are life.

Silence

I fill yellowed paper

With blackened silence.

There was a time

When I ejected words

Mass produced, industrialized and cheap.

In plastic. And well packaged

so that they wouldn’t break

An adolescent obsession

Don’t we all love to write

some poetry? Sign our name

On paper. So that we exist, at last.

Yes, there was a time

When I poured out meaningless words

With pleasure and pride.

With inspiration. And now

I fill

Yellowed paper

With a grim silence