Fragments spun from beach sand, firewood, rose petals, Uno cards
Fragments spun from beach sand, firewood, rose petals, Uno cards
Bits and pieces and the kind of poem you never want to see on a birthday card and another kind of poem you never want to see in a tourist brochure about Paris
I take it all in from seat 537, carriage number 5, moving at 300 kilometres-per-hour through the wetlands, bogs, fields, and forests of my native land, my father country, Loire-Atlantique, former capital of the Dukes of Brittany, considered too urban to be Breton anymore.
The shock of green. So much green it glows under the leaden sky, a green so rich in various greens the cones of my eyes drink it up like a man stumbling upon the miracle of an oasis.
I store the chlorophyll in small pockets of natural wonder tucked away in the dim-lit back rooms of my brain. I need the reserves for the moment I hit the first outer strata of Île-de-France, that island of civilisation in the ocean of France’s barbarian provinces.
The corporate headquarters hunched and foreboding in the sprawling zone industrielle, the megaplexes and shopping malls of the banlieue résidentielle, their neon brand names blazing like a Florida sunset in the Paris fog.
The spiderweb of gunmetal lines that multiply like an acid-induced hallucination, parallel tracks parallelising further with overhead catenaries, pulling us ever deeper into the vanishing point, le point de fuite, always and forever on the run.
Lines doubling, de-doubling, un dédoublement constant, an exponential growth of Y-junctions and T-junctions and perpendicular pylons that slash the light with metronomic precision as the railway infrastructure collapses the broad sky into narrowing tunnels of high-tension wire and trellised steel frames.
The city funnels our bovine herd into Montparnasse - Bienvenüe station for the All Saint’s holiday rush, funnels me further onto Metro line 6 with its squealing tyres and sudden Eiffel Towers, and further still down the final funnel, the ballistic arc of M9, the line out of time that takes forevers you never knew you had to spare.
And here I am, home, where the green is snared in flower pots. Where the green of my 4K screen is tainted with electric blue.
The green is trapped in cubic foliage and ramrod tree trunks lined up like barcodes along Haussmann’s avenues and boulevards.
Greens contained in the dead-square pixels of Place des Vosges. Greens laid to rest in the rectilinear beds of the Jardin des Plantes, des Tuileries, du Luxembourg.
Ever greener pastures contested by picnic-chomping Mölkky-players and wine-moms and dog-walkers, all of us eating the thin grass like emaciated grazing animals trying our very best not to stain the starched whites of our high collars.
The city of illusions I can’t live without.
The city that drinks to forget and smokes just to make sure and that’s merely the apéro.
And this is the point when I close my eyes to tongue a blade of grass I find trapped between two molars, releasing it. The grass from my father’s wild flower garden where the soil smells like nothing such a civilised place could ever give me.
I watch a crow puncture a single-serving packet of fast food mayonnaise that has been baking in the sun.
Swollen like the belly of a cadaver, the chrome plastic bulges under the knife stab of the crow’s beak and finally pops like a tear-gas grenade of vegetable oil so finely processed it could lubricate a vehicle engine.
I just turned 42 and I’ve lost track of just how much time I have wasted. How many health points. How much of my precious ammunition.
I watch a crow perch itself upon a playground structure that looks like a child’s drawing of the Eiffel Tower.
I’ve lost track of how many goals I never set for myself.
The trick is to never really try because you can’t waste resources that you never allocated in the first place.
I watch a crow try again and again to clean the oil from its beak by scraping the glossy black dagger of its mouth across fence railing, heavy nylon rope, rubberized flooring.
The more I think about how time really works, the less of it I seem to have left.
To make things happen rather than let them happen. To see things through.
To create things out of thin air and raise them into giants that walk the Earth, turn the tides, rewrite the landscapes we thought were eternal.
When we collide at light speed as if to throw ourselves across the electro-magnetic divide that separates us, as if we could touch hearts— the hearts of the atoms that make us, sometimes it's the best we can do to say I love you.
