In Paris

In the fresh depth of the morning the city started its action without ceremony

In believing in the purpose of the day was a doing

Apart from the muscular routine of actions based around a system of

Monetary exchange required for survival

The predominant sound the combustion engine

The Seine is a peaceful looking river compared to the Thames, that swirls and frets against its banks like a revengeful ghost. The Seine on the other hand oozes European languor and lazily drifts, it has a different colour also to my home town’s river, a sort of bluish green that changes aspect in the sun. It sits and waits instead of eyeing you up for consumption, saying, ‘Go on, throw yourself in I dare you!’

Swallows and Terns abound in the mornings haze, as I look down I see grey hairs on my forearms today in Paris without out a plan my aim is to cover as much ground as possible in the early part of the day, before the life sapping heat descends and smothers the city in its stifling malaise.

A fattening around the middle man of perhaps his mid-fifties stops by the river’s edge and takes of his white vest, placing it on a bollard. Facing the sun, he begins a routine of gentle flexing approaching the idea of exercise.

City of ancient myth, city of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Mallarme. City where the ghost of Walter Benjamin haunts the arcades. His ghost lost in limbo unhappily cut before his prime, shadow on the boulevards. 

Legend and desire collaborate inside this maze this labyrinth of ghosts inside each one

The I is the minotaur, frustrated lost boiling to death inside its skin.

A motorcycle starts a siren clangs past, some semi silent padding in clear plastic jelly shoes distracts the gargoyles eye view of it all.

Looking up from the dust like an unholy man, mad with the sun bleached ravages of desire, this is historical living for thirty euros a day.

Retreat to a shady café to consult the map, tomorrow we will be back in London and this day will be dream of the past a split second frame.

Parc Des Buttes, landscaped slope, jungle in the city, lush green unfolding before the metro stop, in Mallarme, ‘some golden galleys / beautiful as swans sleeping on streams of purple redolence.’

The feeding baby in the Picasso museum turns the mother into a cubist swollen nipple like three triangles an ovoid and an angry hexagon. Tourists make their way from picture to picture, taking pictures. What would old man Benjamin make of that digital reproduction, the aura drains before my eyes, I was never keen on that period of Picasso anyway, they look like stupid cartoons.

The swollen bodies massed and writhing in the now late afternoon heat which keeps on rising, it is a dangerous age to live in some say, no persecution as such but insipid normalised consent and constant surveillance now. Find some shade to mark time to sprinklers ticking clock, loungers evaporate into the grass, just see the feet then gone, disappeared into the ground. In the air the trace of two eyes like frosted snow globes of Paris, waiting in steaming silence.

At Gard Du Nord way too early the gathering throng outside the main entrance watch entranced at Afro Robotics, the scene is transfixing, here is modernism, here is a multi -level section of this modern strata, the convergence of forces at a point central to its existence.

Transactions are taking place, observations made, eyes follow eyes, raw survival played with ease, the camp with its rules and order, the dandyism of it all is central to its point of entry into Europe, a place of dream exchange of heat and food, sweat and movement.