Inner Cities
A journey into evocations of sound and sense pulsing through memory on waves of poetry and music.
(Click link to hear recording of poem with jazz accompaniment)African Squatters of Montparnasse
On a street behind the old cemetery,
near Baudelaire's tomb,
beneath Babylon's passing shadow,
waves rolling in from Senegal broke
over the city's white noise as drumbeats.
They spiraled through piss-soaked corridors
and stairways of Montparnasse-Bienvenue Station
as trains arrived and departed
in a rush of wheels and sliding doors,
and the streets offered up shards of glass
to the peeling paper of billboards.
Africans camped in raw interiors
of five-hundred year-old buildings,
their electricity powered by generators.
Teapots and soup pots simmered on propane stoves.
Posters of Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey
animated the dead stone of ancient walls.
Recreating their own culture
and enforcing their own law,
they carried on as an underground yet alone
against the ever-expanding grid
of construction and development.
Above Paris,
clouds swirling toward the Atlantic
released rain down over the muddy courtyard
where the African squatters of Montparnasse
carved out space in the underbelly of the whale
wailing reggae into the swarming European night.