I slide my swastika into your lubricious Place Clichy.
I like my women horizontal and when they stand up vicious and Vichy.
I want to jackboot rhythmically down your Champs-Élysées
With my behind behind me taking selfies of the Grand Palais.
Look at my arm raised in the razor salute of greeting.
I greet you like a Caesar, Heil! for our big meeting.
My open-top Mercedes creeps through the charming, cheering crowd.
I greet you, lovely body of Paris, you who are so proud,
And surtout you French artists and French movie stars who
Are eager to collaborate and would never hide a Jew.
My oh my. How times have changed.
But the fanatics have gotten even more deranged.
Seventy-five years after Hitler toured charming, cheering Paris, Parisians say
They won’t give in to terrorist tyranny, and yesterday
Two million people marched arm-in-arm, hand-in-hand,
After the latest murderous horror, to take a stand
Against the fascist Nazi Islamist jihadi blasphemous horror and murder.
Absurd is getting absurder.
It’s absurd in France to be a Jew
Because someone will want to murder you—
Someone who spreads infidel blood all over the walls and floor like jam—
Someone who, like you, doesn’t eat ham.
He/she activates her/his suicide vest.
Children just out of the nest
Wearing a suicide vest
Are the best.
It’s alarming
And queer to read Osama bin Laden writing an essay about global warming.
So he was also human, like the ISIS fighters writing
Poems in the manner of the great pre-Islamic odes in the midst of the fighting.
We are the Marseillaise. We are la civilisation française. Make no mistake,
Civilization is at stake.
We are a paper frigate sailing on a burning lake—
Many decks and sails, and white and fancy as a wedding cake.
Listen. The Mu’allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays, the Iliad of the Arabs, keeps singing
In the desert, “Come, let us weep,” while the bells of Notre-Dame keep ringing
With alarm. In one of the Hadith,
Muhammad crowns me with a wreath
But damns me for eternity, Imru’ al-Qays, and Labīd as well,
But me especially as the most poetic of poets and their leader into hell.
