Perry Thompson

Reconstructing the Madmen

It is not enough that yearly, down
               this hill, April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and
               strewing flowers.
               -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

High nerves tremble thinking
how the last good kiss,
years ago in that boomtown, made
hearts tug moonward,
how the boy and girl
danced in the yelling dark.

Hear them whisper to each other,
said the hero silence, the night so loud.
Corners of Paris, great and secret city,
clatter now with tourists, pop and
flash in the lens of spring.
The Eiffel Tower is hinged to the sky!

April in Paris and the ghostly
ragmen still talk on fire.
Oh, the metro is alive with jugglers!
Forever and loud the madmen of Paris
make their promises on the nature
of longevity under pointed stars,

and learning no lesson from the seasons,
the children waltz on, vows
melting like conversations
overheard and not understood
on the wine-soaked
sidewalks of Rue Lacepede.
Oh, madmen are speaking for Paris!

Rag dressed and stumbling darkly, they
kill the dancing
lovers sure as midnight
tugs the past to life.
River laced and moon drunk
is it you and I who reconstruct the madmen?
Is it you and I in our ancient waistcoats,
who breathe the lovers'
insubstantial dreams away?

Please let it not be
the two of us who, unwitting,
smile the worm into the blood,
into its boomtown under the skin
where lovers cut and hack their
wrists to let it out!
Oh the maggots of tick tock
riding high and dark,

hot on the trail of the boy and girl,
carry in their teeth a jealous ash of Paris.
And soft rotting things laid
long in the streets
tremble thinking how that last sad bliss
rose in steam above the traffic
and pulled the soul up after.

It must be some evil twist of loving,
shapes of death in fingernail and
hair that slaughter our
children, horrors of our secret lives.
We can't bear Paris jacked with Nazis,
danse apache before the firing squad,
our personal fetish and nightmares
laid open.

It can't be you and I in our cups
and stoned to the hilt on gin and heroin,
who reconstruct the madmen,
who reconstruct the worm in the blood,
who reconstruct the ragmen,
who reconstruct the maggots of tick tock,
who reconstruct the dead
soft dissolving lovers on the boulevard of tanks,
who blow their
insubstantial dreams away.

Perry Thompson was born in Georgia in 1950. He graduated from high school in 1966. Two years running he was awarded first place in Columbia University's Gold Circle Award For Poetry for which he received a nice letter. He holds no college degrees. Mr. Thompson has been previously published in Columbia Review, Dekalb Literary Arts Journal, Lonesome Virgin and Chattahoochee Review. A civil rights and anti-war activist during the '60s, Mr. Thompson has been handcuffed, spit on, hosed down, beaten up and generally abused by his fellow Americans. He currently resides in Key West with his wife, Marsha, and their cats, Bramble and Midnight. Mr. Thompson is the proprietor of Rainy Day Records.