Paris and Newark: Same Difference

Paris is a lot like Newark, New Jersey. There are buildings and roads and cars and people. The people like to eat, sleep, fuck, have a good time, and earn money. They smoke cigarettes and they drink alcohol and they occasionally look up at the sky and wonder, but mostly they just go about their day. It is really quite the same, in fact. They have windows and door frames, they wear socks and shoes when they leave the house, there are trees with leaves and benches in parks so that people can sit. The people eat with forks and spoons, chopsticks in Asian restaurants, and they laugh the same and kiss the same, and even fart the same. In this sense it is also a lot like Seoul, South Korea and Ko Phangan, Thailand and Edinburgh, Scotland where people also live under roofs and have windows and door frames and eat and sleep and fart more or less in the same manner. There must be some correlation between these places that I’ve been. A common conqueror? A silk road, perhaps?  What a profound disappointment to discover the world is full of farting people that reside under roofs and have eyes and ears and butt cheeks all the same.

So I am from here and you are from there, and I have been here and you have been there, and we can talk about it until one of us falls asleep in our soup (which is also the same)—but aside from a handful of astronauts and a myriad of lunatics no one has ever been anywhere all that different, because, well, it doesn’t exist.

Ode to the Eiffel Tower

I once read that you were nothing more

than a giant dick rising into the soft Parisian sky.

(I didn’t read that, I made it up, but who’s to know or care?)

Although man always can (and always will) build a bigger phallic,

you are the unmatched bachelor in this city of arches.

Fastened by a million bolts? A million links of steel?

What does it matter, anyhow?

If you really care, Google it.

Your glory lies in that like hope or love or god or death

you can be seen from almost anywhere,

but then at times you are forgotten.

And last night I discovered while chewing on a stale baguette,

that when night falls, you are not a penis after all.

Under the mystical guise of darkness

your steel staff transforms magically

into a golden waterfall in a diamond dress

that dances on the hour like moonlight on the sea,

and that no one, not even the dead, can watch with honesty

and not be moved.