Hardcore

Black Mariah Number One
Blotting out the burnt-out sun
Cackling Fakir on the roof
Spikes and swords and tiger's tooth
Fits of laughter in the middle of the street
Raw gums and bleeding feet
Shoot the bombs before they hit the ground
Get your stray bullets at the lost and found

Flaming hair in the Summer Twilight
Fresh air orgasm at the End of the Night
Break the heart before it beats again
Drown the pieces in acid rain

Imaginary Parts of 'Z' / The Bellyscratch Whores

It’s so silent in the deserts of the mind
It’s so bloody cold out here.
The bleak white sun wounds the air
And bleeds rather than shines.

He’s so tired he can feel himself think;
And he’s been sitting here since God-knows-when,
It may have been a year, it may have been ten;
His hair is turning white; your eyes are turning pink
Unless I’m seeing things:
It’s easy to hallucinate
When all you have left are your eyes and your fate,
And one of them burns, and the other one stings.

Gathered here we are all bereaved
And cynical about it – some of the time.
We are starved for Literature and thirsty for Rhyme
But all we ever do about it is feel grieved
Or listen to midnight sighs, or both, or neither.
Thirsty as we are at the bottom of the well,
Vulnerable as we are beneath our shells,
Cold as we are at the bottom of the seether –
It’s all in our hearts, it’s all in our heads:
The world is full of love when the world is full of fear.
There are those who’ve never laughed and those who never shed a tear,
But they’re all the same to us, we’ve torn our brains to shreds.

We seek solace in the forgiveness of Time,
And therefore repeat, neverending, into its silken ear –
It’s so bloody cold out here,
It’s so silent in the deserts of the mind.

I find this a bit rambling and confused, but it is a worthy introduction to the Juvenilia, both in that sense, and in that it centers on some very common themes for me at the time. These themes were: blank page syndrome, and a generally bad opinion of so-called "literary" people. I never got round to choosing the most appropriate title, as each refers to a different theme in the poem. So I just left both.

Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du recyclable

J'interromps le programme habituel (par ailleurs de moins en moins régulier, je m'en excuse), pour expliquer les entrées a venir qui seront publiées, sous le label "juvenilia". Ces poèmes (tous en anglais, "Lunes" étant mon premier vrai poesme françois) datent d'avant la création de ce blaugue et étaient confines jusqu'à maintenant a un bout perdu de l'Entretoile, poemhunter.org (bon site par ailleurs). Ils ont été écrits entre 2004 et 2007, a Versailles, en Irlande, et a Pékin pour la plupart. Certains ont été utilise comme paroles lorsque je me prenais pour une rockstar, d'autres sont inchantables.

Quoiqu'il en soit, ces poèmes, de qualité variable, sont une partie importante de ce que je suis de plus en plus tente d'appeler mon oeuvre.

Change of pace O my two readers. The next few posts, under the label "juvenilia" are poems I wrote as a teenager in France, Ireland and Beijing (2004-2007). They are the beginning stages of my poetic work (which is by no means finished), and should be read with the indulgence aforded a 15 to 18 year-old. Some of them were used as lyrics when I was the raspy long-haired lead singer in a rock'n'roll band in high school. Others proved unsingable.

I have also put in this category some of my earlier English-language posts - Last Stop Said the Angel, the Crimson City of the North, etc. as they conform to the time period.

You be the judges.

Amour, gloire et beaute and may the Force be with you,

MT(esq)*

Come Around Now W.B.

Standing (at the counter) acting like a POET
Inhaling freetrade glucose and serpentine dreams
I was IN CHARACTER, I did not want to blow it...
But then my mind left my skull and burst through the beams
Looking for The Ultimate Comfort, a Great Flood
Of Faith, or salvation, or just plain sunshine
Every single drop of my caffeinated blood
Yearned for something higher, would that it was mine.

It was with the eyes of the POET that I gazed
At the rape of the world, quiet and unfazed
I thought I was strong, I thought I stood tall
It was with irony and insult that I glared
At the somber morons with whom I shared
The most POETic idiocy of them all.

("I thought I was a poet, I had so much to say..." - Low)

Short and sweet, one of my nonsonnets (poetic form that enables the author to pretend that e knows about poetic codes without actually having to bother to respect the specifics of the sonnet)

Epitaph For William Butler Yeats

Youth is in the land of poets!
The liquid mirror that he dreamed of
Is polished ruby as the sun sets
And peace comes dropping slow from dawn’s veils above.

The swans still bask in Coole Park
And under bare Bulben’s head
His passionate youth has made its mark
As have the legends it has bred

***

Your grave is just as you wanted it
No fancy stone, no cliché phrase:
Just your words by the sun are lit.
What better way to sing your praise?

No saga no legend no myth
Has ever cast such a cold eye
On life, on death
William Butler Yeats, it is with a bow that we pass by.

A bow and a raised glass to one of my favourite poets. A poem written two years ago in Ireland, one of the rare surviving pieces of that period.

Last Stop Said The Angel

They say there is a town, just a few miles East of here
Where they eat their own babies
The chemist sells bottled crocodile tears,
Flasks of powdered toad, essence of rabies.
Between Nothing Park and Nowhere Gardens
There’s a shrink that nobody’s crazy enough to consult
Whose office is full of awaiting burdens
And who’s founded his own (suspicious) cult.

There’s a tavern where the punters are shiny green lizards
With a taste for strange places, tame catatonia and folklore
The barman’s a narcoleptic wizard
And together they drink and fuck and drink some more;
Catastrophic amounts of tea, whiskers and pain
Sift through the atmosphere’s alcohol.
It’s a beautiful picture of ugliness and rain
When they drink from their gallon-tanks of petrol.

Oh wonder of wonders, the sky is black even at night
Oh marvel and idiocy, they’ll curse it sometimes,
The pale toads of day. They may be a sight
To soothe sore eyes, but their blood is as sulfurous and heady as Time,
Though it may be human? But who gives half a shit
It’s all only a question of Death,
And Money; they bleed money - they can afford it,
They can allow the coins to drip from their breath.

In English this time, a little absurdity made in China.
J'ecris principalement en Anglais, et ce depuis plus longtemps que je n'ecris en Francais, donc va falloir vous y habituer, il y aura ici un melange.