Paris What an Artist's Paradise (as Juliette Once Wrote Me)

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

In the autumn of 1983,
I took residence
In a room on the grounds
Of a Lycee Technique
In Bretigny-sur-Orge,
A commune in the southern
Suburbs of Paris
Some sixteen miles
South of the city centre.
And for those first few months,
I was happy, blissfully happy
to be a flaneur in the city
which had inspired
so many great poets
to write classics
of the art of urban idling,
And the following versified
Refugee from
At the Tail End
Of the Goldhawk Road
Briefly touches on this phase.

Paris What an
Artist's Paradise (as Juliette Once Wrote Me)

...my paris begins with those early days as as a conscious flaneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper, qu'est-ce-que t'en pense and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or vagrant who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on tessa's wide-brimmed hat getting soused in les halles with sara who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze sara again with jade at the caveau de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with milan who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place du tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and deleve and a leather jacket from the marche aux puces porte de clignancourt losing cary's address scrawled on a page of musset's confession walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis, what an artists (sic) paradise (as juliette once wrote  me)...