These are odd guys who write for a living
or do not have one, depending of the moment.
These are odd guys who walk through the fog
with birdy steps under the wing of songs.
Their soul is stuck under the Seine bridges.
The money in the books they never sold.
Their wife is somewhere at the end of a tune
that tells us about love and forbidden fruit.
They put colors on the grey of the pavement
As they walk it they feel like on the sea.
They wrap ribbons around the alphabet
and walk their words in the street for a stroll.
They sometimes have dogs to share their misery
that lick their hand of writing and friendship,
their snout lit up by the faith
that guides them toward the lands of nonsense.
These are odd guys who look at flowers
and see in their creases the smiles of women.
These are odd guys who sing misfortune
on the heart's pianos and the soul's violins.
Their poor featherless arms remember the wings
that literature will later pin
on their ghost frozen above trash bins
where their verses will die again as an expression of Art.
They walk in the blue yonder inside cities
And know how to stop to bless horses.
They walk among horror with the head in the islands
where the souls of persecutors never drop anchor.
They have paradises some deem artificial,
And their twopenny rhymes are put to jail
as if a building were covered in chains
just because the bourgeois dwell in the sewer.