The Cats of Paree

It's been many years since I've been to Paree
Where I played for that French girl. Her name was Marie.
And she sang, she sang so lyrically.

"Oui, I'm a cat."
" I don't care about that.
But don't you think you could play in B-flat?"

I murmured "Oui" as I changed the key
And Marie she sang so beautifully.
A beautiful song without any "Rien"
And when it was over she sang it again.

I'd felt half dead. This was in '45.
But as Marie sang I felt quite alive.
Ah, that beautiful song without any "Rien"
Just me and Marie. That's the way we were then.

All over. All over. Yet what can I say?
Well met by moonlight on the Champs d'Elysee!

The words of my Daddy I still can recall
“If you just write light verse then you’re nothing at all.”
This was in the Fifties and there were many sad men
Who remembered their twenties in the forties and then
Wrote many sad poems where they danced the tango
With sweet girls from Paris “It was long ago
In forty five after the Germans had gone
She was so sweet and so pale and so wan
She was so sad and when we went to bed
“Just hold me, please hold me,” was all that she said.
And the room was so cold and there was no light
And the cats of Paree howled all the damn night.”



Jesus was not really with it
He was called a Flibbertigibbet
Hence his birth
On this railroad Earth
And the time spent on the gibbet.

Jesus remarked to the Buddha
I really wish that I would a
Had your sang froid
Before the dreaded damn void.
"Yes," Buddha replied, "You should a."

My mother said "You go to Mass!"
My Dad said he'd kick my ass
So I pretended to go
Thought they wouldn't know.
Except there was this girl in my class

Who heard me tell my friend Steve
Of a sin she could hardly believe
That I went to the drugstore on Main
And there did disdain
The Mass! She found it hard to believe!

And of course she told her dear mom
And mine, of course lost her aplomb
When she heard of my sin
That,of course, was within
Her son. Ah, then the pogrom!