High up underground in Paris summer Mondrian metro Austerlitz

wwwiThe Awkward Squad ww wwwwPoetry by Eddie Castellan

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	wHigh up underground in Paris xx7 September 2009 The summer city is lost without its crowd calm but not at ease in fractured silence lacking the automatic spirits, the precise and machined assurance of oblique work We make love and space for Mondrian, 25 floors above the roots and stars of insects, aloof from the cloisters and carrion, plotting quiet and harsh dispossessions of bells And fall like snakes to find a jaded toy in flatness and starkness on folded tin bogies, placed on thick black greasy track by a great grimy hand from nowhere in a box Suddenly and everywhere there's stubbled sax racing, juddering and Latin jiving to the pulse and stink of the muscley girl and the bearded girl and the acrid puke of brakes Hot she-devils erupt under the bite of white tiles turning the kaleidoscope to off and Metro dark and spaces of events, as the city sheds reluctantly its body hair, and rich and sticky sweat But the power-play dissolves in just three stops, under the thrash of unwrapped sheet steel doors, dwindling to the tenor's black-hole grin and glutinous cap, all deathly stained with centimes The drag and drop of the overground lures us to absence of malice, Madeleine and Stalingrad, towers and pieces, weighty and solid with dust and cats, marked in stiff turf on the map Cacophony and maze distil to moving thoughts, schematics, projections, places on the board, so now we know the human system, somehow plagued by gaps and newly-unsolved paths Dropping the keys to unanswered illusion, a symphony astringently dissatisfied, our night train breathes from Austerlitz, counts the elusive and whispers the unsaid

		*It's neither the Metro nor Gare d'Austerlitz but Monet's deliciously atmospheric view of Garew St-Lazare seems the irresistible choice*

		*One of the Seine bridges, I forget which*

		*Chez le bouquiniste - one of Paris's trademark booksellers along the banks of the Seine*

	All poems and other texts on this site are the copyright of Richard Edward Hugh Castellan 2009