Love the Words Like Dylan Thomas

God’s hand stretches a moonless night over Paris, elongated and tearing at the third arrondissement. A familiar criminal sleeps helpless by the church, one with the rats that gnaw at his Iberian-blue caplet, stolen from an enamored Américain. He tears at the eyes as the expected chill of catacomb-cold-breeze billows with the grasses.

A million sculpted eyes are sleepless as a feral cat toys with one stone mane, stone train, of hair flowing in an imaginary wind. The real breeze leaves the feline unphased and the mane still pushed back as if, in that moment, the artist had just designed her Grecian locks.

Le Chat Café is still aloof with spirits, the towering apartments home to clothes-drying widows and well-footed rats balancing along the rails of grandfather’s, then father’s, then son’s balconies.

A psychic sleeps in her immeuble, knowing her dreams nor her fallacious-fancies with the dead true. Instead, she charged that same Américaine a fair fee of 50 euros to know the place of her dead mother’s caplet in the Parisian streets.

The docks are most alive with scurrying messengers, who whisper lullabies with dead men’s voices, the musky bones of artists and criminals, bankers and debtors, kings and pierres. Atop some mound they chant, but not even the crook can decipher that mitten-muted call. Atop one another, you can hear the rattling unrestful sleep of a million night-walkers, demanding the city sing.