Shadows move through candle lit courtyards.
History with amazing accuracy,
Is sewn into the giant white rocks and pillows.
The arches lend enough light to display soft tissue
Under their bloody scars.
Decadence, man's romance,
Of spears with flint heads,
Dug trenches for artists like me.
Waterfalls for tired sky gazers,
Rest for now and watch the lights.
For it's heaven reflecting down, in a trinity of lakes.
And me, being the poet I am,
Obsessed totally, by the things man can never change.
The cries and hunger,
Of the blessed tears of Paris,
Show life to be an inhabitance of beauty and wonder.
The night opens the shutters of the peep shows.
The pavement is a stage,
And the roads end in the imagination.
In this case it was pere la chaise.
There was a grave there,
Another monument, if you like,
A mecca for like-minded people.
A warm refreshing splice of midday rain,
Sparkled over the tombs.
Drenched in branches of willows,
The cobbled streets wound like a maze.
I walked with my girl, hand in hand, as you do.
I had a birth stone on a necklace.
And a napkin,
With some poetry I had written, in a restaurant the night before.
I threw it among the other poems, and roses,
That have gathered over the years.
I hope the words were soaked up by the rain,
And then absorbed by the mud,
Giving the worms something to think about.
Bitten by a sudden sadness,
Thinking about journeys and their ends.
What was arranged by the fates to get me here.
What inlinement of planets could snuff it out.
.
When getting the tube back,
Old drunk men boarded the train,
And recited poetry for money.
This is where Baudelaire sounds the best.
Even in the twitching lights of the 21st century.
- Luke Welch
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