Would it be easier if I had a guitar?

when you dont have a guitar...

I hesitate to make any grand statements on the basis of what is, possibly, an experience based on my own slightly strange nature...
But I've a habit of making grand, sweeping statements, so why stop now.

If they had no greater meaning or attraction to me, the streets of Paris have been for me a venue and source of greater emotion and simple human connection than I (in a life of admittedly limited scope) have ever experienced.
In the entire course of my lifes experience, in joy or sadness, I have never wept as much as I have on the streets of Paris.
...For reasons of my own.
...For what Ive seen.
...For what Ive experienced.
...For joy and sadness and anger... and for when Ive been unable to find reason why.

I stood quiet, an hour upon the the Beaubourg. I watched a twisted man, his face visible only in elevation. I watched him ragged, rotting and with nothing, carefully feed an unlikely swarming flock pigeons surrounding him on ground that his own feared even to walk.
I felt my own privilege.
I felt a moments notion of the loneliness of a man so divorced from his own that the fetid, winged rats of Paris have more affinity for him than the thousands that pass him and coldly photograph him as a figure of romantic urban colour.... if they recognise him at all.
I felt the inspirational beauty of a man, in the truest sense of manhood. A man who, with nothing, has grasped tight upon the fundamental truth that you are what you do and why.
A man who, with nothing, can still find the heart to empathise with the few lives around him, more pathetic, unloved and helpless than himself.
I watched him bent, stinking, loving ... and alone amidst the birds.
I watched him and wept.

I have wandered the riverbanks in sunshine and shower.
Amidst the glistening, cliched entwine I have watched the simple moment of the quiet joy of two people.
No extravagant embrace.
No hollywoood kisses.
A lazy leg draped over another.... soft-eyed glances across the pages of whatever.
Insignificant moments of sweet nothings that carry a weight of love, empathy and understanding.
I watched these moments of simple contact, connection... love... and I wept.

Music.
A minor key struck in a moment of shadowed, afternoon sunshine.
Walking the streets, any streets.
Peopled streets.
Weeping for nothing more than a key-change and a break into late-evening sunshine.

I have wept now, at the thought of all that I have seen.
Because I have seen it...
... and because I am remain frustrated at being incapable of describing it.