Montmartre
By: Charles Giuliano - May 01, 2022
Montmartre
Famous for
Artists and bohemia
Apache dancers
Pick pockets and painters
Penniless paupers
On the grift
Catch my drift
A steep hill
So many steps
Daunting ascent
In shadow of
Sacré-Cœur Basilica
Commanding views
In the 1950s
Then a teenager
Sidewalk café
Me absorbing
Fifty cc’s of Paris air
Feeling avant-garde
Gypsies sold roses
A couple circulated
Blousy torch songs
Evoking Edith Piaf
He on accordion
That oxymoron
French music
An absurd instrument
Entertaining idiots
Looking for love
In all the wrong places
Ah Montmartre with
Its Bateau-Lavoir
No. 13 Rue Ravignan
At Place Emile Goudeau
Decrepit rat hole
Rank and defiled
Warren of studios
Some twenty of them
Picasso and Fernande Olivier
With poet Guillaume Apollinaire
Organized 1908 dinner party
Lavish event
Outrageous bash
Everyone smashed
Elite gathering of
Soon to be famous
Honoring outsider artist
Henri Rousseau
Primitive painter
Then retired bureaucrat
Le Douanier or Post Master
Played street violin
For spare change
Picasso bought a painting
In a junk shop
For five francs
Just a few sous
Chump change
Canvas to paint over
But didn’t
Now in Paris
Picasso Museum
Priceless treasure
Occasion a spoof
Making sport of him
Idiot savant
Beggar’s banquet
Picasso’s mistake
Caterers wrong date
No food for thought
Hosts uptight
Fernande forraged neighbors
Scrounged ingredients
Eggs, sausage and rice
Bits and pieces
This and that
A huge paella
At the last minute
Gertrude Stein
Scoured the hood
Olives and cheese
Not that it mattered
Cheap red wine
In France not bad
Many wild toasts
Eccentric roast
Rousseau performed
Scratchy old tunes
How they howled
When he bowed
Marie Laurencin
An erotic dance
Flailing about
Then passed out
Sprawled over pastries
For a boozy snooze
Word spread
They came from cafes
Frédéric of Lapin Agile
With flatulent donkey
Farts for art
Oop poop a do
Rousseau toasted Picasso
“You and I are the greatest painters
I in the modern genre
You in the Egyptian.”
At dawn they left
Some slept on the floor
Too soused for sex
Rousseau parted
With Gertrude and Alice
Famous from then on
Humble postmaster
Myth and mystery
So it would be
From them to me
Keeper of defamed
Embers of memory