Stranger with a mullet and baggy cargo pants.
Keep smiling because it’s all that can’t be taken from you.
That’s what he said in broken English with a French accent,
begging for money.
Parisian metro scalpers.
Unfortunates.
The note grows sharp and the train rattles forward.
No, I have nothing to give you.
Faint smile, till I lost him standing further away in the next car.
Would I speak so eloquently,
with strange kind eyes, gazing down at men in their seats?
Then a screamer then enters at the front of the car.
I can’t understand, because I don’t know the language.
I’m not from here.
I can’t know the stones from which you rose this morning,
beneath the lights of the Eiffel tower,
on the tearing banks of the Seine.
Ryan Shockey Davis 