Lettre à Mon Amant

Ooh mon cher Driss ooh,

 Comment vas-tu ? Je suis à Paris et c’est la même l’histoire comme à Sydney. Alors you have passed by my apartment late last night after I arrived, sadly I was apparently dead asleep and did not hear you knock. You left a piece of paper under my door that you would come by this morning I will see which hour that will be. I have stayed awake in these early hours.

J'attends, I wait, I heard everyone in the building waking up and leaving for work. J'attends, I wait, the birds started to sing there morning song. I saw from the window a man on a bicycle on his way to work. There was another man smoking a cigarette walking towards the office. The police sirens are starting to whirl; their noise starts to fill the air. The sound of the traffic starting up then to starting to halt and the sound of their horns as the circulation congests in the peak hour traffic. I turn on the jazz radio to drown out the time, to drown out the sounds of a city waking up.

I do not know if I am asleep or awake. J'attends, I wait for you as always. J'attends, I wait caught in a dream of waiting. I walk the wooden floor boards towards the window. At the window I take a sip of coffee and I have the hope that I will see you in the street crossing the street to my apartment. J'attends, I wait and the wind groans and I do not see you in the street.

Si tu pouvais juste aimais-moi. I want to believe that tu m’aimes.

It’s funny how love can become a cold rainy day like an autumn day in Paris much like today. Dit-moi que ce n’est pas vrai. My tears will dry before you are here. Je t’aime mais si tu pouvais trouver la sensibilité de juste aimais-moi. You are French, Parisien you do not understand the distance like an Australienne like me. I am not certain that you understand the secret wishes in my heart. You are my low down dirty shame... You are my heart ache made better, comforted in the bed. Come toward me...Come to be against of me...Come to my door...Come to be by my side... Come to be opposite me... Come to be in front of me... Come to be on top of me. Kiss me! Give me a slap as I demand! Baisse-moi! Put mouth on my mouth. Pull my hair. Choke me.

The sky moves slowly moving further away edging closer to eternity. I am here in Paris and you cannot make a plan to be by my beside a plan nowhere near my heart. Somewhere in Paris tonight you were sleeping but not by my side in this 6th floor apartment with a lift that start on floor 0½ come to the top where you will find me on the 5½ floor where you will find the door to my apartment where you will find me.

F.

Bonnie & Clyde

To the other half of my heartbeat,

Once like lovers on the run in Morocco I am your Bonnie, be my Clyde. Just as she had sympathy for the devil so do I.

I no longer have a long way to travel to get to you. Lost in a crowd of six million people you came to find me in my hotel room ghetto-suite-styling down by the water. Never knowing before what a Sunday could be in this weekday room.

You don’t have to pick the lock I gave you the keys to the city and I am free for you to lock me up. I can hear my house key jangling on the metal chain in your pocket all the time knowingly telling me love has my address.

I think you know my mother gave me something that gives me good swerve. You know I have it as you ran to me and I put it all together makes me everything a good man needs.

We run this town you beside me bombing down to The Spot with my red lipstick kiss tattooed on the nape of your neck beaming above your white shirt collar, for all to see. With my lipstick matching gleaming up on the high street that you are mine and my navy blue linen dress swinging hitched into the elastic on my black panties like a modern-gypsy –outlaws. Linked arm in arm my tattooed garter belt showing on my upper right thigh acting as a holster for the tattooed grey metallic gun glinting underneath.

We can play stick'em up at the Night Owl index fingers blazing. Sneaking into The Verona cinema to hide out after running out on the bill from Bar Millazo - Claudio hollering - shaking his fists. I do all this as I love you my man and I am a liar if I say I won’t. I would be a liar if I said I don’t.

Sleepwalking through the days without you and walking where the mood takes us together through the nights to my secret places in this city. We can dive into the harbor on a hot night I know just the spot where the water is deep. We can sun bake at midnight in this concrete paradise - this hot bitumen city made of brick. There is always my apartment to wash this place off your face it sticks to you like glue gets under your finger nails with the summer grit. Just as I have pieces of you stuck to me so I will never let you leave you are my slave now.

Singing in the street with you whistling on my arm I know I don’t have to put my dreams to sleep and my heart aint got no obituary no more.

XXXX

F.

Ella

I am listening to the radio as I always have. Dead jazz singers eyes on the world proof nothing much has changed, their ghostly singing ringing out in my apartment where time stands still. Ella gently whispering in my ear that help is on the way from the beyond.

My Siren Song

Cara Andréa,

I am lost at sea here! No shipwrecked! A refugee! I lost my passport! PUTAIN!

I dream of the Indian summer in Firenze, my café doppio made for me by a real paysano, served to me in a white ceramic coffee cup. Not set adrift here in an apartment with a view of the Eifel Tower. However the apartment is comfortable but there are no tea cups so I took my coffee in a Bonne Maman jam jar this morning. When will I leave? Do I want to leave this place? I am lolling here entranced in the limbo of no-man’s-land. Presently I have no country, no papers no proof of my identity, as if I were a clandestine so for now I call this home.

Here in this city there are apartment buildings that have ornate bare-chested bronze and stone statues of beautiful larger than life size women, avec le monde au balcon. Sirens with their chiselled cloth swirling around them, engulfing the balconies as if they were holding up the building somehow like Atlas himself, the Titan. I sense them as if they watch over me as I pass by, as though these beauties were the sirens that hang like the figure head on the prow of ships in this land locked beige wilderness. They peer at me from across the street at this dizzying height of the 7^th floor. The sirens navigating this stone man-built terrain and let the buildings that they cling to rest anchored in this safe harbour. They give their blessings not from the Roman god of the sea Neptune but from Pluto, the god of earth or is it better put Hades, my unknown hell. Singing their siren song to me perhaps in words that I cannot hear a silent choir, I understand this as I cannot sing aloud so when I write it is me singing aloud on the page, this is my songbook, my silent chorus.

There is the most adored ornate old fashioned mirrored, wire and timber elevator to let me down from my perch high up here. It is cold here in Paris and I watched the hail bounce off the old lightening rod yesterday. It glows at night as if it were my lighthouse that has guided me to here, where I have set anchor for now... Oh memory bliss. I have suffered all the nightmares of being left destitute to be close to this man un Arabe en plus! So I stay no longer enamoured...

...with this city and with him, I am no longer certain. I slept alone last night. A man told me he would not leave me alone, not even for a second; he would ‘donnez les yeux,’ in effect give his eyes for a woman like me. Putain! Bientôt, je vais chercher une cigarette. However he is all things to me we are both creatures of the wind. The difference being that I blow towards him and he is set free, wild like the winds in between the sails of a ship. Or is all that billows and blows the indifferent winds of fate.

Perhaps I am just blowing smoke from French cigarettes that seem so very strong. I take a long deep draw. I sip my Bonne Maman coffee and I look out over the grey metal rooftops, dormer windows and endless terracotta chimneys that stretch out seemingly forever to form a distinctly Parisian skyline.

I think and wonder about these old vertical cities of people who dream on top of one another. In these austere times what happens to all those dreams, those hopes and prayers. Do they go unanswered? Left to float into the ether like the smoke from the stem of my cigarette, left to gather like the grey storm clouds above and fall back down onto the tin roofs as rain, the sky mourning with them solemnly.

It is Friday so I lit some candles as if it were Shabbat. The candles glow with the same coloured light as the old girl. I had a thought that she is one big candlestick for the people of this city and for me, it lights up...

... a path in the sky, to let me navigate my way back home, my own land locked Robins & Crusoe tale. I want to live in a landscape, a wild manmade terrain where my stalwart heart is set free not left to lament over it as if love had turned cold like the weather on a winter's day.

It is raining now and the old lady is cloaked in heavy fog. I would prefer to think she is hidden behind a cloud or a haze of my cigarette smoke. It is heady, the smell of the Les Gauloises. When I exhale as I walk in the street it is my smokescreen, as I sit at cafés it is my camouflage.  As though when I breathe smoke there is a fire inside me that comes out when I exhale that no rain, no pompier (fireman) could put out. I am the keeper of my own flame it smoulders and burns inside me. The candles which I lit are burning low so I put on the radio, TSF Jazz and they burn higher - brighter.

The sun shows its elusive face for the first time today heureusement. I look out over the square and I think to Jacques Prévert who had his parc Montsouris and I have the Square de Carpeaux. As I look down on the heads of the tall proud slender poplar trees that are still clinging on to their green leaves, it does not look like an autumn day with the gleaming gold between the trees, a new day reborn on a winter’s afternoon.

Dear Andréa à la proxima.

F.

Arrive Singing at Les Folies Bergère

Chère Kellie La Merveille, 

I stopped singing the dirty Delta blues. I hope that I have found some resolution between the sheets. I am tired of chasing dreams. I want to put a spell on him because he is mine, didn't Nina once soulfully moan all that jazz? He is mine for now. I am his always. I stopped stabbing the keys, just a gentle tap, a léger tinkle.

The lady on your postcard holds a letter close to her heart, the caption reads, ‘La Lettre Brûlée. Elle est brûlée. Ah c’était fou!’ Translated it says, ‘The Burnt Letter.’ She is burned. Oh it’s madness! I hope you have not burnt all my raving mad postcards.

I can hear the joyous laughter, cackling and youthful uplifting singing of girls leaving Les Folies Bergère théâtre.

This man of mine seems to be always singing Gainsbourg and his song and tune he hums is, ‘Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais’ (I just came to tell you that I am leaving). Alone I sing like Gainsbourg and Boris Vain's song, ‘Je Bois,’ (I Drink). Like the blithering-blind-drunk young man from the night before. It took him a half hour to navigate my street hardly 500 metres in length. In his drunken stupor people turned on their lights from all floors of these eight storey Haussmannien apartment buildings. Asking him to be quiet, as if that could contain him, I guess it was nearing midnight. I felt sorry for his girl, who could not quieten him or hasten him. I laughed to myself as he sang in his slurred French vocal stylings.

Perhaps I am singing more the likes of darling Ella (Fitzgerald), her and me together, ‘Sippin’ Black Coffee’. Love’s hand me down brew, and from one o’clock to four all we do is talk to the shadows then pour. Never knowing a Sunday in this weekday room.

Without your voice, I suppose nothing is possible, and you are bound nowhere. The lesson from the imbibed gentleman from the night before and his noted appearance on my street, late night on Rue de la Boule Rouge, the only sound to make is to arrive singing.

We must all sing if just for ourselves, to ourselves as we all hold a song in our heart of hearts. Let it be it the low down blues or a hypnotic schizoid scatting number to hopefully sing the world back into vivid being. A choir of solemn songs creating a soundscape that gives the universe a soul that has a rhythm, that beats like an animal skin drum in line with our own heartbeat.

This city can show itself to be beautiful in the sun but oh what the sunlight masks. However I am just a bleeding-open-wound-paper-cut in this postcard town, I rang this city it answered the telephone and called me here. Although it can be mean spirited and however how cruel it is, I am still keen.

I draw open the curtains leaving them wide apart on the fifth floor so all of the ninth arrondissement can see that I have company tonight; so all of Opéra and the people of Les Grandes Boulevards know that I do not sleep alone tonight.

Love,

Fayroze.