Novel Moves to Montmartre By Patrick Henry

Place Cliché high on city squalor reeks of Henry Miller or Henri Toulouse- Lautrec, And one character here come-lately. I invent myself in a cheap attic Down Rue Barbes, Street of Beards, at times assuming the guise Of the goatee triangle set entrancing within female thighs. Tropic of Cancer author a thin telegraph boy lit out from Brooklyn To ravish lush Paris crumpet, no way an Errol Flynn, Found his treasure not only in Gauguinesque girls' bronzed skin,

But in a force to create images which this rank place is breeding.. His classic works sprawl like diary jottings on a café table: Metaphysic visions to free spirits trapped by the low mundane Share grubby pages listing the lewd lurid pick-up scene. On a word-count his four-letter kind will be beat them all.

Obscenity his game, he denied the title, pornographer. Roused libido he gave himself, but aimed deep meaning at the reader. US prophets are not fine as Blake, Wells, Verne, Nietzsche, Zola, But rough diamonds on the road: Whitman, Kerouac and dusty Miller. Gallows-birds of bar-flies drool over days when Can-Can dancers wore no drawers, Trembling the pencil of Lautrec incapable on his stumps where he draws.

Miller swived a bird here on the dance-floor through the quickstep and slow waltz, And on the fox-trot snuck in the hen-house to make the feathers rise. My type-keys rattled on a job translating Clavel's "Fruits of Winter". A prized novel on The Vichy in The 'Forties all France suffered, Holding no romance, jokes or glory; only the victim and the traitor. Brothers at war twist the knife until one sells out his own blood.

Mourna shared my pad we wrote on. She sang, I spoke, at the poet's café. A star-sign seer, she scorned what only eyes can see, And saw a slant horizon in the lines across my palm. In mist gathering she held our chaos briefly calm. Elena need me as her minder, believing menace stalks Her throughout Europe, driven off the edge To madness by those who'd grab her virtue and her cash. I half-planned to buy a gun down the gitane markets. Deeply I loved her, but could never touch A finger on her, it would be stealing from a child;

Elemental, though nearly middle-aged, Maddening, yet pure in this low, warped, gone world. Prude Anglo guardians trashed at ports the books of Lawrence, Joyce and Miller, Said " no sex, please. We prefer the high-class murder thriller". Daring raw novels, "anything to declare?" asked Dover Custom, Not finding the confession I smuggled inside this harmless poem.

Copyright ©2006  Patrick Henry

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