The Avante Garde

THE AVANT GARDE
A Poem by Rene Velez

"Inspired by the Artists of the 1920's"


I slap the paint brushes dry
with the palm of my hand,
he just laughed when I did so
looking deep into his
persistence of memory,

I, a child in wide eyed wonder
of a lost generation in Paris
this side of paradise,

moved by the beat of jazz
and fifty million Frenchman
caught between night and day,

I fought against wandering ways
wondering for whom the bell tolls
in the warm and distant Paris night

though smiling with laughter
of the deformed and cubist
of four little girls and a myriad
of infidelities,

I shook the hand of an Iconoclast
revolutionary, a smuggler in Carmen,
the obscure object of desire who
politely directed me
out of my revolving door.


© 2012 Rene Velez