Vagabonds literally means 'vagrants' or 'wanderers'. It's an evocative word that paints a picture of something aimless and free.
In the song, MIKA personifies kisses as "baisers vagabonds" (wandering kisses) that sleep under bridges. This imagery gives the kisses a life of their own, suggesting they are lost, unattached, and searching for a place to belong, making the word both poetic and memorable.
"Les Baisers Perdus" ("The Lost Kisses") imagines every kiss that never found its moment as a small, wandering creature loose in Paris. They drift like stray gray cats over the rooftops, sleep under the bridges where the Seine flows, and end up in the gutter instead of the mouths they were meant for.
MIKA uses that image to talk about love fading in ordinary, everyday ways. A kiss dreams of being stolen but never dares to land. Even a captured moment, like a Doisneau-style photograph of two people kissing, is already a memory rather than something still happening. Love doesn't end all at once here, it just slips away a little more each day.
By the bridge, the song turns the question on the listener directly: when you're standing right in front of me, where do these lost kisses actually go? There's no real answer, just the same gentle refrain returning again and again, that we don't save lost kisses anymore, we just let them wander off.