O'Hara

at 8 in the morning
there is no one beautiful
on the streets, at least
not on the rue Glacière,
nor on Gay-Lussac, a good thing,
for my eyes are freed of the tyranny
of facial symmetries and voluptuous bodies,
allowing me to radiate in the morning
with the glowing stones of an old façade, golden 
then gone with the breeze behind my bike,
a last gasp of beauty before I am plugged in
and fed pixels and polite conversation
which is really not so bad
when washed down with free coffee or
cantine delicacies as exotic as shark or rabbit,
and then of course I can spend time with my friend
Proust who has just told me about the time
he followed a hot woman on the street 
but turns out it was just that old hag Madame Verdurin.

anyway it is all just an opiate
numbing the dejection at my utter failure 
to produce anything of note
during my lunch breaks, unlike dear old Frank,
though if he dreamed of Paris during his strolls
then I live in his dreams,
the winged observer gazing down from my perch
at the monuments, washed over by the waves
of the constant drumming of heels and boots against
stones and pavement, the sound rising up invisible
to the clouds, low above the towers of Saint Sulpice,
lapping ever so gently at the windows
where I see myself faded and transparent,
dreaming of Marcel and his loves.