The Virus of Paris ‘17

One of the nights that I spent climbing out of a half-dream I was there at the Eiffel Tower looked at it for all of three seconds and it—the surround sound, the smell of stale Pulp, a thousand deadly sins—it was like I was in a casket with stars for a ceiling, laying still though legs moving seeing midnight blue for the first time and not just black masquerading as blue; the colour of romance is always the colour you haven’t seen before. Earlier, when the streets were glitzed out by a languid Paris sun, I escaped the heat to find a hot spot, wrestled museum air around the crowd in front of the famous half-smiling woman. From the corner of my eye a few dozen people away I caught her looking and I swear the universe tilted a fraction of a degree, cloudless blue into an ocean with half its colour and twice its metaphors, and as the night unwrapped and real air stirred, I side-stepped glossy women passing by in teams their arms linked like daisy chains, hair and half strut as seen on TV. I felt the prickle somewhere in or around my body and did not know then that something virus-like entered me filled my head with bigger ideas about the universe; a bud mangled still waiting to bloom it could still be me. And the ancient rock its steel its dust its rusted spaceships were not so old the ground couldn’t be resoiled a life couldn’t be replotted—we will plant seeds over catacombs, imagine the sidewalks flushing green my cheeks lust-red until there’s no imagining left because we are there—we don’t wait for stars to constellate I don’t think they ever will to be totally honest with you but I am sure more of them came alive that night, I saw them, and from where I was looking up at the endless open-top hall, I swear they could’ve been dancing it’s what we call twinkling here on earth when they die. A billion stars came alive and a billion more died that night all watching me I was there I was really there. Some nights I close my eyes.