Paris- Matthew Sergio Zuniga

The first thing I notice when reading this poem is how it differs to all the other poems I’ve read before in which sophisticated and antique language dominates all of the poem. Paris by Matthew Sergio Zuniga uses essentially my same language. He uses modern words and terminology that I feel familiar with. And I like it.

I will do an attempt to write down my thoughts as I read the poem:
The poem is in past tense except the last two lines which express future. So Zuniga is remembering a hot afternoon in Paris within that memory he remembers something else and imagines the events in his surroundings. He definitely is a foreigner: he refers to the people around him as “French”, hence the strangeness of the environment.

In line 5, the first line to go alone (after and before four line verses) Zuniga mentions that “It was hot.” The exception of this line, in terms of structure emphasizes its importance to the poem. The climate was hot, the place setting was hot and he was hot that is why he takes off the shoes in the first place. Why do you take off your shoes? Because you are resting, because you are tired, because you want to cool down your body, as Zuniga did. Hotness often links to being tired and your mind wonders off, off from the normal track of thoughts. Zuniga calls back an unexpected memory that has few to do what he had been talking about. But he justifies his fussiness in the next two lines that, as line 5, are also alone (not in quatrains): “Even in the shade/ I got a little delirious” this statement links to the one Zuniga did in line 5 about the heat. So the overheating is a key fact because it affects what he thinks.

Zuniga associates that hot, lazy day of his with a “living museum” (line 22) referring to everybody around him, including himself as part of the exhibition. It is like is he were in fact high and had an outside body experience I think they call it. The sensation that you are watching everything from behind of a glass, in an omnipotent kind of way. And then comes another exception verse, a one like verse: “or the friendly stranger named amphetamine.” (line28) Zuniga puts in doubt his lucidness. Amphetamine is a drug usually used to get high, a psych stimulant drug. He includes in his association with the “living museum” animals and God. Zuniga hints his resemblance to them because “they” don’t know they are part of the museum as he. They do the same as he does to “pass time”, take off their shoes. He feels like God and animals, unaware of his presence in a “living museum”, just there, under the influence of amphetamine and heat.