poems 78-80

Posted by sarahsmiles on December 23rd, 2007 filed in poetry

<strong>Impaired Liberty</strong>

The contagious identity of our inventions;
restrictions from heaven, restrictions from the law.
Injunctions and invocations.

My constraint biased love:
the trap of unweary charlatans,
my own fantastical myth
that has no meaning
even to itself.

<strong>Gypsies @ Garre du Nord</strong>
“Do you speak English?”
“No.”
The quote of the day.
Roma in Paris have British accents.

North Africans at Sacré Coeur with wristlets.

Hassled outside the museum of man by a
buck-toothed gypsie who wanted to return to me
the cheap ring he ‘found’ on the ground for a reward.
Never fell for this in the past, as he quickly realized.
But I was looking ‘la touriste’, so he is forgiven thinking
I’d want a 0.00009 carat gold ring… and it was a man’s ring
though it might have looked good on my big toe, though it
is surgical steel or nothing… well platinum.  Poor guy,
I’d been watching as he’d reached down to pick up nothing
before the ring had appeared in his hand, but I guess
that is my fault for noticing. Just a gadja, an infidel to the people.
I don’t exist, except as a raw resource.
The tragedy of that assumption is clear.

We sat in the park, eating and drinking; goat cheese with peppers,
Auvergne sausage and some ancient grained baguette, all served
up on a backpack with a swiss army knife.

What was the response? “Oh, that’s not my ring.”

And the wanker wants my sausages! Not at 28 euro a kg!
Shout and eye to eye expletives.  Thinking he could shout
two women down. Women with a backpack and a swiss army knife.
It is strange to say that I had to go european on his ass,
ameri/british packing up and moving on just wouldn’t do.
Pointing the knife to my chest I ask “Puyuria?” laughing,
do I look like some gypsy groupie? Third time he gets it.

<strong>You must!</strong>
When did I stop loving art?
Perhaps when it got to love me.
When it, body and soul,
made love to itself, on show,
for the whole world to see.
When it stopped seeing me as a woman,
a person, a sinner a saint. When it saw
me as just a consumer to sell to.
Don’t forget that I am your art,
I inspire all that you do,
and you must make me immortal.

<strong>Salvatore Rose</strong>
Action–action in the sunshine.
Passion–but little feeling, and less thought,
such was meant to be our existence,
but we refine, we sadden and subdue.
We call up the hidden evil spirits of the inner world.
We wake from their dark repose those who will madden:
“He was made of all nature’ s most dangerous ingredients…”

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