Apollinaire

Edward recruits a renegade poet to his motley team of thieves.

To where would I direct a voguish stranger, maybe out of raw mischief or curiosity, who implores me from the shaky café table beside to reveal the identity of the freest spirit that lives today? Shall I further his strange quest?

 

Yes, that furthering stands to be lucrative for –

 

Or perhaps the voguish stranger, sly behind his darkened glasses, smart upon his very unnecessary walking-stick, creeps his inquisitive tentacles around his prize, and the questions half in jest are a cosmic joke in whole, no, greater than cosmic, a macrocosmic paroxysm of foolery!

 

Witty poet, O psychotic bard, I have sought you in serious –

 

Speak, pleasantly-dress’d American stranger!  Talk, squid!

 

I have sought you, Apollinaire, in serious –

 

Lies! Thou art a fish!

 

A fish, maybe so, poet, but I remain a fish who speaks, and at that poor French, and a fish far from its American waters, and a squid in admiration of such a talented speaker of its own tongue. I am a rather entrepreneurial creature, having swum to France –

 

 France! France from your fishy lips is a beached and baking whale! I do not think it so, Monseuir Calamar, I love my dear republic. She is less a baking whale and more a sweltering hippopotamus, blind and stranded in a desert somewhere, and searching ardently for more artists to arrest and then eat, and don’t forget arrogant.

 

Guillaume Apollinaire, I require the freest spirit in all of France. Where can you suppose I might have luck in discovering him?

 

That handsome b*****d Apollinaire? I think you’ve just missed him –

 

O, how lame! Were I not so dilatory, he could have been richer by ten francs!

 

Ah, I think now perhaps this strange quest –

 

But this b*****d poet Apollinaire, is he my free spirit?

 

I don’t know … is it worth it?

 

It very well could be.

 

Then I suppose his spirit is mine, for the immediate time being. Now politely deliver those francs, stylish squid, and perhaps I could write for you a lengthy sonnet. You can have the one I planend to invest in my sweet Ophelíe. I have lost my hope in her already.

 

Generous, poet, but a sonnet is not quite what I necessitate.