The Year Of The French

When you got back your watchmen were a-groveling
Pearse Street now thoroughly monopolized by vermin
They were setting fire to your cloth replica
They’d hung poor Patrice like some pale portraiture
It’s all barbed silent gestures
The insignia lingers
They took his fingers and they put him in the marsh
There was a right to-do in Castlebar

Back in Athis-Mons
There were Parent Trap antics with your first wife
Leonard Rossiter was in line to portray you in Napoleon
How good would that have been?
A Kubrickian finger on the Moviola

But something changed
And something re-assembled in your mind’s eye
I’m trying my best to be the rebel with a cause
But I could well be out of time

Jacques Zabor taps his ashes on the boot scraper
While the continuity polaroids drop into your soft hands