John Allman
The Life Abroad
Paris between the wars and who didn’t get
laid we left jobs to walk stark naked in
bookstores fractured faces on canvas blow
a hole in the conductor’s podium
I mean there in that city you got news
from everywhere hot you heard Kafka was
breathing his last and Gertrude was scolding
Alice you heard that looney poet broke
on the Italian coast was taking rich
young men under his wing and somewhere a
magic mountain had been coughed up mein
gott what didn’t the bourgeoisie think of
us fucking Baudelaire tropes as if lives
depended only on breaking syntax
