This poem is happening in Paris, France
where it’s raining and we’re all so drunk
that it’s impossible to keep a secret.
Every morning the waiters say bonjour
and every morning I drink my coffee
with a kind of American sadness
they’ve started saying hello.
Hello, beautiful man I’ll never have
on Rue Charlot. Hello, woman smoking
by the Seine and closing her eyes
between drags. We’re all lost, even in Paris,
and if this place won’t take my mind off you
I guess I’m in love and in for more rain.
You are the man on Rue Charlot
somewhere in Brooklyn, peeling an orange
and thinking of buying a suit.
I would like to be an orange in that suit.
I would like all the men on Rue Charlots
across the world to put in their resignations
and stop torturing me. Let me chase fire
on another street, in another country
where someone takes out the orange
and peels it. And puts it slowly to their mouth.
There’s a pause. The woman closing her eyes
opens them. The lights on the boulevards come on.
Someone smiles. Someone sighs. Someone lingers.
Someone in Paris, France is thinking of you.