Poetry

Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s 4

by Carl Halling
08/26/14
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A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted Part Two Book Five Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s 4

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

Thanks to the large quantity

Of notes I committed

To paper while at Leftfield,

My beloved college can live again

Through writings

Painstakingly forged out of them,

Such as the poetic piece below,

Based on several conversations

I had with my good friend Jez,

A tough but tender Scouser

With slicked back rockabilly hair,

Who'd played guitar in a band

At Liverpool's legendary Eric's

Back in the early eighties,

When Liverpool post-Punk

Was enjoying a golden age.

These took place at Scorpio's,

A Greek restaurant situated in

North West London

Following a performance at college

Of Lorca's Blood Wedding

In which I'd played the Bridegroom.

One of the Greats Who Never Was

"I think you should be

One of the greats,

But you've given up

And that's sad.

You drink too much,

You think, ____ it

And you go out and get _____,

When I'm 27 I'd be happy

To be like you.

In your writing,

Make sure you've got

Something really

Unbeatable...

Then say...'Here, you _______!'

You've got the spark of genius

At sixteen, you knew

You were a genius,

At nineteen, you thought

What's a genius anyway?"

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

In the autumn of 1983,

I took residence

In a room on the grounds

Of a Lycee Technique

In Bretigny-sur-Orge,

A commune in the southern

Suburbs of Paris

Some sixteen miles

South of the city centre.

And for those first few months,

I was happy, blissfully happy

to be a flaneur in the city

which had inspired

so many great poets

to write classics

of the art of urban idling,

And the following versified

Refugee from

At the Tail End

Of the Goldhawk Road

Briefly touches on this phase.

Paris What an

Artist's Paradise (as Juliette Once Wrote Me)

...my paris begins with those early days as as a conscious flaneur I recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro

when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper qu'est-ce-que t'en pense and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or vagrant who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on tessa's wide-brimmed hat getting soused in les halles with sara who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze sara again with jade at the caveau de la huchette jazz cellar the cafede flore with milan who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place du tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and deleve and a leather jacket from the marche aux puces porte de clignancourt losing cary's address scrawled on a page of musset's confession walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis, what an artists (sic) paradise (as juliette once wrote me)...