The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs

Author:William S. Burroughs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4170000000985
Publisher: Arcade Publishing

Paris Please Stay the Same

Maurice Chevalier prances out with his straw hat...

I’ve seen your mad days

Some of your sad days

If I’ve been happy

Then you’re to blame

Paris please stay the same

The last time I saw Paris

Her heart was young and gay

No matter how

They change

I’ll remember her that way

Some time ago a friend conveyed to me the melancholy news that Codethyline Houde would henceforth (owing to the Common Market) be dispensed on prescription only. And I felt the same deep pang of loss as I experienced when they ripped the urinals from the streets, tore down Les Halles, and cut down the trees in the Grand Socco of Tangier and changed the spelling to Tanger. T’is gone, t’is gone ... another comer of the 19th century ... brightness falls from the air... the urinal, Les Halles, the trees ...

‘Codethyline Houde .. .’

‘Oui Monsieur... une ou deux?’

‘Deux.’

I’ll remember her that way.

‘The things we have never had remain. It is the things we have that go .. .’

‘Maintenant il faut une prescription, Monsieur...’

When I think of these passings, they appear to me as if I were looking at something far away and long ago through a telescope. I can see myself propped up in bed, a bottle of little pink pills and science fiction books on the night table, the bones ache and racking cough of Hong Kong flu soothed by this beneficent preparation, squirming with sheer comfort beneath the covers like some 18th-century English gentleman who has taken to his bed for the winter. And I remember when I still had the habit after a day in jail...

Pharmacie ... green neon letters in electric blue twilight... washed down twenty-four pinkies with a café crême, then it hit the back of my neck and crept down the backs of my thighs and there was this Edith Piaf number on the jukebox ...

You can hear my goodbye

In the whistle of the train ...

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