☀ Today's Poem: "Place de la Nation" Jason Allen-Paisant

You leave the house and head to the gym. You ride the metro.
You listen to some music. You read a novel
try to act cool
like you belong here you’re so French

You travel in the underground going from side to side of the city
The darkness helps the white noise in a crowd
The crowd must be thick
or you will see your body

raising suspicions by walking
you do not want that

But then you get to another part of the city
and re-emerge, and you’re hit with images again
of yourself in the space, and yourself

is two beautiful dark-skinned children
just innocently sitting on a bench waiting,
not bothering anyone, just waiting &
you want to weep because they are so beautiful

and nobody should be wrong to be
so beautiful in this world
& that beauty lies there knowing that one day it will lift
itself from their bodies
like a question
You mourn the future loss of this being,
so full in space, so occupying, so sitting before you
on the bench. You re-emerge into this life
raising suspicions again.

*

They’re from Mauritania they say, brother and sister,
They sit there on a park bench
along the busy way &
look at me with doe eyes a look of discovery

in the fine grain of skin, the perfect lines of teeth
the stillness, as if no language had yet been made
as if the first day on earth.
They look into this world
deciding whether to enter

nobody should be wrong to be
so beautiful in this world

And he’s running right now...
There he goes right now!

*

So you try not to act too muscular not to look too big
muscular looks very threatening on your skin

you want to walk hard, jog hard, be hard
but today you think about your mother

you owe it to her to protect her from this
what you can do what can be done to you

you’ve just come out of the gym you feel fit
you feel strong you feel large and full of blood

but you small up yourself and keep going
you read endless messages about your body
you’re consuming your body
All the images fill you

And he’s running right now...
There he goes right now!