Page 11, "The Persuasion"
Chapter 2
The plain brick walls of Gare du Nord were on fire, orange and red, stories of the time in yellow and blue, violet and chartreuse.
Posters papered iron girders every whichway: Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho, read one, its smiling namesake fingering a hammer and sickle where normally he would have stroked a cigar.
La poésie est dans la rue! Not a terrible idea, street poetry, but I was not in the mood.
The station was massive, track beside track, trains with dozens of cars trailing into the distance. Though nearly ten at night, the platforms buzzed with mad hornets, propelled by destiny, I thought, undertaking necessary and important journeys. I, on the other hand, was here to turn my pencil on end, erasing memories not scribing new ones.
Departing the train meant amputation, cutting from the last scene where he and I were both in frame, the train chugging out of the station, him head down walking the tracks in the opposite direction.
Decompose the emotions
Separate the strands.
One foot then other
In the future I will land.
I had a rhyming couplet for a situation like this. This time at the third or fourth round—I couldn’t even concentrate enough to know how many times—I caught my sandal on the platform.