Stephen Kessler on George Hitchcock

September 2nd, 2010 · Obituaries, Poetry, Poets

Here is Stephen Kessler’s obit for George Hitchcock, as published yesterday in SantaCruz.com.

George Hitchcock, 1914-2010

When I was an undergraduate and aspiring poet at school in upstate New York in the mid-1960s I started reading the small-circulation independent literary journals known as little magazines. It was a volatile historical moment when cultural life was starting to erupt in all sorts of unpredictable forms, and one of those forms was this suddenly dynamic proliferation of creative periodicals run by eccentric individuals with a taste for poetry and some esthetic agenda or political viewpoint to promulgate, and read by a self-selected bohemian elite. One such journal was the San Francisco quarterly kayak, a remarkably lively magazine launched in 1964 and publishing some of the best poets, both famed and unknown, then writing in the United States. The editor and publisher of kayak was someone named George Hitchcock.

Like pretty much every other anti-Establishment poet in the country, I wanted to be in kayak, so I started submitting my poems—and promptly receiving them back along with shockingly irreverent rejection slips with deadpan regrets from the editor accompanied by a comical collage or illustration clipped from some 19th-century picture book featuring a man falling into a hole or being devoured by wolves or shot by a firing squad or suffering some other unfortunate fate. These rejections, in addition to being amazingly quick and thus sparing you the agony of suspense, had a lighthearted “tough luck” in the subtext—none of those “we-found-much-to-admire-in-your-work-but-due-to-the-large-volume-of-submissions . . . and-good-luck-placing-it-elsewhere” notes more typical of today’s creative-writing-program-based reviews. No niceness or phony encouragement tainted kayak’s forthright rejections with insincerity.

When I returned to California for graduate school at UC-Santa Cruz in 1968 I met George Hitchcock at a small gathering at the home of poet Morton Marcus, who had also moved there that year to teach at Cabrillo College. As destiny would have it, Hitchcock moved to Santa Cruz the following year to teach writing and theater at UCSC’s new College V, whose academic theme was to be the arts. While continuing to collect rejections from kayak I gradually, in the course of occasional encounters, began to get to know its humorously grumpy editor. Near the end of my career in grad school, before flipping out and dropping out, I took George’s poetry workshop, and when the term was over he invited me to serve as his teaching assistant next quarter in improvisational acting. This seemed to me very strange, as I had zero experience in theater, but evidently the teacher detected something in my poems or personality that he thought would enable me to improvise the role of his TA.

Instead I continued my graduate studies in various madhouses up and down the state, returning to Santa Cruz the following year unsure whether to resume pursuit of the PhD or take a leap into the unknown and try to be a writer. One night George’s friend Kenneth Rexroth was giving a reading on campus and I happened to run into George on the way to the hall. I told him I was thinking about going back to graduate school but wasn’t sure if I should. He asked, “Do you need the money?” I had a fellowship but also some family income, enough to live on. “No,” I answered. He said, “Don’t do it.”

It was the best advice I ever received.

In those days before the MFA industry and Garrison Keillor made poetry a respectable occupation, to decide you wanted to be a poet was not a plausible career move. You were dooming yourself to a life at the edge of eerything, with neither a guaranteed income nor any sign of societal acceptance. Hitchcock, with his own anti-academic history and a brief career in progress as an accidental professor, apparently had concluded that, at least for someone like me, unemployability was a better bet than professorhood.

Eventually my poems made it into the pages of kayak, and in 1975 George published my first book. The kayak imprint was a great endorsement, and though the book received mixed reviews, it did get reviewed, and at the premature age of 28 I was launched as an author. Hitchcock, in his gruff and subtle way, had given my so-called career a supportive shove. I wasn’t the only poet, young or mature, for whom George had played such a role. Over the next several years I would meet many of them in the community that grew out of kayak, both in its pages and in the legendary collating parties where the magazine was physically put together.

Three or four times a year, on a Sunday afternoon, dozens of poets and friends of kayak would gather at George’s house in Santa Cruz to collate, staple, stuff, stamp and send out the latest issue. George—a skilled printer, among his other crafts and arts—by then had printed the pages himself on a press in the shop on his property, and the issue would be assembled by his crew of helpers, whom he and his partner, Marjorie Simon, would supply with platters of cold cuts and plenty of beverages. It made for delightful social life—many good friendships and collegial acquaintances were initiated—and efficiently accomplished the mission of putting out the magazine. George was the director of this operation, positioning people on the assembly line and instructing them on procedures (if this was their first time) but otherwise assuming as low a profile as his leonine 6-foot-4 physique would allow. He ran things in a way that enabled his helpers to run themselves.

His poetry workshops worked much the same way. George rarely commented on students’ writing, rather allowing participants to read and remark on one another’s efforts. He didn’t assert authority or try to push the poets in one direction or another, instead just listening attentively, sometimes making a brief comment, or starting an exercise with some object he would pass around the room—in his apartment at College V in the workshop I took with him in 1969, later in his living room in Bonny Doon or in the big Victorian on Ocean View in Santa Cruz—and turning the writers loose to riff associatively, giving free rein to their imaginations.

It was imagination that he valued above all—not autobiography or sentiment or noble thoughts or “spirituality”—but a sense of invention, discovery, astonishment and wit. In criticism, intellectual honesty was paramount. kayak ran from 1964 to 1984, a total of 64 issues, and that was that. George, as self-described “dictator” of the enterprise, was ready to move on to other things—more of his own writing, visual art, teaching, acting, directing, traveling. He’d been a merchant seaman, a labor organizer, a gardener, an actor, a novelist, an investor (municipal bonds, he once counseled me, were the best place to put your money), a poet, someone you couldn’t easily pin down with a limiting definition. After the earthquake of 1989 he and Marjorie left Santa Cruz and returned to his native Oregon, where he continued with his various activities, spending winters in La Paz, at the tip of Baja, where George, as “Jorge Hitchcock,” frequently showed his whimsical, surrealish, sophisticated, mordant, quasi-primitive paintings and collages in local galleries.

George Hitchcock died at his home in Eugene on the night of Aug. 27. He was 96 years old and had lived an extraordinarily creative and fully realized life. He was an influential teacher, more by example than direct instruction, to many other writers and editors, including this one, and a legendary figure in the literary culture of the ‘60s through the ’80s—a model of independence, ethics and integrity—without ever making a spectacle of himself or trying to play the role of anyone’s guru. He didn’t like to be the center of attention but enjoyed providing a setting for others to interact and flourish. kayak was both a highly individual vehicle, a “one-man boat” piloted by the editor’s singular vision, and a community effort created at his famous Sunday get-togethers.

At a time when the academic formalist model was fading as a viable style for contemporary poetry, and the New York School and Black Mountain poets and the Beat movement were on the rise, George took kayak in its own unique direction, cultivating an imagistic, surrealist, non-doctrinaire, irreverent, often political, sometimes polemical sensibility, and publishing a range of poets from W. S. Merwin and Raymond Carver and Michael McClure to Robert Bly and Gary Snyder and Philip Levine, as well as many lesser-known bards like me. The magazine also printed letters and George’s collage illustrations—always provocative and amusing—and had a section for criticism where I published my first book reviews. It was easily one of the most vital publications of that or any era in American poetry.

But his post-kayak years were at least as fertile, with a prolific output of art and a continuing creative evolution as an all-around man of culture who proceeded on his own path while also encouraging others—for example, endowing a poetry fund at UCSC for nurturing the art and its writers through readings and other programs.

His personal style, in the years I knew him, tended to tweed jackets, sometimes a cape, paisley ascots, rakish hats (often with a feather in the hatband), a pipe, a walking stick—a somewhat Oscar Wildean figure of anachronistic fashion—and a resonant tenor voice that bespoke his stage experience. He liked to dress up in a scary costume on Halloween and give the trick-or-treaters the fright of their night. The Day of the Dead, with its dancing skeletons and festive celebrations of the departed, was a holiday suited to his darkly comic temperament.

He hitched his kayak to a star and blazed a long bright streak across the sky.

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Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 7

September 1st, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Ray Bremser - Mary Beach - Claude Pélieu Photo: Allen Ginsberg - Cooperstown, NY

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

WRITTEN AND ERASED IN THE FRISCO SKY

A bit of eternity in the pink window.
Blond mountains riddled with poppies and corn-flowers.
(Stones swallow our tears, a lava flow transforms the landscape, on its high heels a tidal wave ravages the West Coast)… we chew our cud in the shade of tall trees, high on the mesa, a smell of burnt toast invades the universe. The stars dance… raisins, nuts, almonds… the wind rips the pages of newspapers and mini skirts… perfume and pearls travel faster than light. Everything quivers in the Velvet Bay, the Illumination Cobalt Blue Bay — paprika accompanies the wind, Cosmic Drag, Donald Duck fucks Mona Lisa, the Masked Lobster sodomizes J. Edgar Hoover — void dances in the margin, sparks rob the Cold Bank… robots impose a violent censorship, and on the blue screen a beautiful flesh-storm, gusts of screams and prayers… gongs and tambourines, we’re in the blue jungle and we risked all for an orange girl with a boy’s ass. The automatic pilot writes in the sky FADED SMOKE, drifting… flood of alcohol… acid hasn’t been outlawed yet… crazy television sets, skulls stuffed with multicolored sausages… some say that it’s still too early and roll in greyness, the others arm themselves, to hear and see nothing.
Paradise lost? The fluorescent city’s arms roll on the screen, twisted, broken, they’re the streets and the old films oxidize the young years, flesh cracks as a sign of mourning.
I’m speaking from very far away from today, and from the depths of the 50s and 60s, upside down, in the middle of undecipherable mutations.
Time opens up in capital letters — the Monkey alibi is solid — sono, stereo, lightshow, the video lifelines that we all have within us, like the screams’s test-wall that ticker-machines pour into the files. We weren’t sure we’d speak about this again, in the sewers of Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam and to repaint both sides of the scenery with juicy, stinking shit undeniably French… EXORCISM !!!… unnerved bodies groan… speed, alcohol, barbiturates, H… exorcism to recharge the sweet almonds incrusted in the Blue Kid’s body, moving in an old film. Time’s crockery dissolves in savage shudders. De/collage of every sound-image. We move very fast in time and space & we write over every landscape in neon.

Anti-death lighting.
Here, bubbles & death, why so fast?
Napalm, Coca-Cola, IBM, ITT, myths, operetta toys, soap operas, meditation-chromos, A Festival from Nowhere — the Blue Kid was in Frisco, like a shadow among the guests, like a shadow expelled from sleep… a smoke & sound affair, sucker-images that bodies follow like the fireflies in Cherry Valley sky — lives eaten away by minute-metal, clots of death-TV flung at high speed on the Santa Anna Freeway, a few crumbs attacked by pollution.
I see again the old Black woman in Panama City, and Bilgray’s Tropico, Panama Rose and Ixca, disorder’s bastard asleep, naked on a beach surrounded by tape-recorders.
And Caryl Chessman’s insomnia on the musical chairs of Alcatraz and San Quentin… we inhale the odor of human linen and dead salad…. we know nothing.
A cadaver on the surface of an ocean of beauty spots… mutiny… a duel on the snow.
Toxic images, prisms prisoners of frost, cement-mixer images, swells like the suns, eye-harvest on the gallows, aurora boreales… grass vanishes under the Offset shower, Tabloid Krishna… the weather was fine between curtains of silence, happy cosmogony in the prompter’s box, the old film was blue, the blue of a generation on a bandstand, and all that cities have seen and heard in broken syringes and old eye-droppers… New York, 1964, the demonic screen… several films, Batman, Flash Gordon, Silver Surfer, Captain Weird… Chinatown, Needle Park, the Bowery… Marx ass-fucks the Pope, Dali sucks an old condom that had belonged to Truman… and that diligent silent humanity puked into the stable of the American Dream… AMPHETAMINE TERROR!!!
Memory’s locomotives blow TV antennas.
I saw the cops strip sick junkies. I saw the Gay Scissor Brigades in the columns of the San Francisco Chronicle with the Beat Generation’s bastards living in the dawn-weldings, a time for contempt…
MOJO NEWS… the Spade howled, there were 500 coming from Greenwood, Mississippi to lynch him… the Blue Kid cut in the orange of a vision, cut with a blow-torch in the Nerve-sector, outside the scene — blurred dawn, elsewhere with flesh speaking a makeshift slang born of earth-sweat, living colors hanging onto the tender hills of New England, shadow mounts drowned at Fire Island — we were the survivors of that Electric Season.
Uptown, Indigo Off Station, the Snow Subway — everything’s blurred, we can’t get by anymore, we must push the dirty-finger-curtain aside — A beggar dies on a bench, Avenida Solitario, in black light and stereophonic jolts… the shadow barks, screams tumble with the dirty fingers, the antenna-man murmurs “here, fast, now”… DREAMSCOPE… with which face should we weep now?
Neon-lianas, red thorns stretched under the skin and the colorless veins of your name rot in the bone-pit of time. In the sleeper’s eyes the negative Quai Aux Fleurs — damp earth, jumbled, flaccid, black — extra-terrestrial mechanics, a dialogue between heaven and earth… continents drifting in mist, salty, asbestos Spring, white sun, disturbing pendulum… neon unfurls a tango moon.
The menagerie weeps. Heaps of bones and starfish, tonalities lose their foothold. Nerves yell like cameras. On the branches of laughter gloves consume themselves on the magicians’ hands. I’ve counted the days, the nights, the gaps, the hollows, then blue letters were blurred in the sky’s spittoons, with grass bent by fire, and barrels of sores, and wings fluttering… Alone on the Heart Strand, I understood that the wind wasn’t a ghost. Waves, eddies, signs, clippings, sighs rushing flush with the ground over the Spanish gorse. Target-night, freaky wind, frost bows.
The Golden Gate Bridge wavers, undulates like a plate of spaghetti.
El Paso Motel, Dead Water Valley, don’t wonder if I talk to you from so far away… I hadn’t written a single poem then, speed-funk is indescribable, between spark-fingers the last phosphorescence, slow masturbation in cooling sperm-cisterns. Moving erections, memory-plugged melodies, mopped up by pollution noise that burrows into meat.
A tempest of dry ice. Pinball Machine, peyote chewed by Nueva Barcelona tape-recorders… Indian flowers, snot-nosed peninsulas, a joint opened on incense paper, and flower on a black background, thrown over as the heart wills.
Flower round about midnight, I say you’re immortal, I, me, as white as snow, back to the wall, leaning over that bit of skin — so far away, stoned on the back seat of the Buick, in front of that pink villa, in Mexico, contemplating pebble-samples, petrified in that floating bus, from Tijuana to Mexicali… round about midnight… the shadow of Brocéliande crashed on Acapulco — two very pure notes immobilized over Baja California… Methedrine hitting every cell, dirty tickets melting in the smoke, grey things wrecked in the cold dawn, and Flower crucified on the joint-hedge, crazy tomb!… the docks, knife slashes, shots… musical flushing and entrails placed end to end — Star-gallop in jasper, turquoise and opal stars, Speedfreak on the high seas with the time-tatters, with the Peony Kid, in a faint overdosed, blue anemones caught in cocaine crystals, Montana’s pink cough, fears, escapes, pains, an orgy of solitudes — we’re in the Vomito, crime capitals aren’t romantic. We’re near the cramp basin, in the arrival of bubbles, wandering from pad to robot-kitchen, from Panama City to New York, FLASH!!!… you can say that again!… all that was left were my lips around my teeth, and even then! Then the flash needle, making my veins blossom once again!… I must get out of this, fast, now, and allow music to penetrate the Universe, like the poems drifting in the Bay of San Francisco — silence recorded a little before dawn, the angel tows fog-horns… hookers and drag queens motionless on the sidewalks of Turk Street… sono penetrating the vague moon… sky lit, steamed up shop windows. El Paso, Santa Monica, Sheridan East Corinth, Long Island… rain, interplanetary nightclub, neon lights on the nod in the stones of this continent — and all those who fall pushing their bubbles along… good God! Eyes are made to hear, and nothing is real enough — so I waited, staring at the corner of a Formica table where a cup of tea was cooling, to make my waiting easier I filled the jukebox with quarters, I thought of a face, a shadow hanging onto the vein tree, I soothed the crabs, I held out cash, and pocketed the sachets… and SPLAAaasssshhhh! The pain’s white capitals were doing the split — and then, one day, just like that, the nervous systems prodigious memory makes a decision, my cells were in a panic, operation “Let The Shit Go!” then the metabolic wheel started to spin… icy leaks, the great wheels dig into space… a light mist made of grimaces, strangling and spasms… the sickness marries your body — so, to sleep, sleep, sleep, on my knees begging for a last needle… crouched in a corner, shuddering, cramps, covered in sweat — monstrous flowers hit by that white shit, Iron Street, my skin filed by blue cornflowers-puncture-points… my eye flat against my ear panics…a dizzy fall… a horde of red rats attack you, and you wave your arms in the avalanche of cramps… and that comatose sleep on a man’s back, that wool and cotton space-suit, and guts knotted in alphabetic index of agony.
Grass is scorched. White flowers are turned into blazing serpents. The gates open, you are the first to attend the festival of the quick and dead, you’re the switchman of terror. You drive with headlights off, your eyes are unzipped by the ventilators, and meanwhile dharma-skin of the conscience-world is overflowing with blood on the arms of the sun.
We were waiting, bunched together, stinking of sweat and sickness. A guy had just hanged himself in the head. The ruins of this sorry feast were frozen hard. Horrible details ambushed under the doormats. I guessed what the headlines would be that pleased the bosses, Drugs! Big Catch!… you bet!… There will be a lot of sick junkies on Frisco’s aquatic pinball machines said the Examiner… a day like any other, cops track down junkies, dealers do their accounts, the CEOs question their computers, and old hookers are moved to tears… flakes of recycled crowds, hundreds of meters of intestines will ooze out of Subway halls, great bubbles and spatters, and your veins opened by the dawn semaphore… Dawn tells me that from the nerve-drums you must only think of life.

Smack explodes in the hard frost. Blistered images held in puddles. Cops, transvestites, hookers, kids, extinguished in the muffled silence… the objective TO BE STONED… just high, that’s enough, nothing more, dangling implacably, Junkie Blues, the bubble fiesta pushed in haste, hauled off shore, a superflash slipping along your veins, time pukes through the organs of pain into the cavern of your neck — the city with the twisted arms, burst veins in the turn, grey dreams rehashed on Long Knives Street, flipping out with the sharp whistles of old photos, crouched in the dawn’s locks — that day the sun moved dangerously, lilacs smelled good, the morning star shone, voices within flesh’s reach — the Technicolor Kid deported to the forest of dirty fingers, reanimated in the flowery flows of Old Mexico, two green eyes torpedoed, tracer-bullet eyes searching through 1000s of scripts… or leaning on a bar, an eye on the high seas, scratching myself furiously, and the Sepia Kid, hair floating between the Buick and the Dodge… the mad race of tears in the Mexicali dawn beaten stiff… or stumbling on the docks, the autopsy of a slick face in the hourglass of fluid time.
As soon as you try to find a vein, asshole, the copy of your absence drinks from death’s bottle.

We didn’t die, we’re cured.
LSD revealed to us the whole howling, hilarious thirst of body and soul. We drank from that milk in the eyes of a young fairy. Life goes on submerged in modern drugs, legal ones, drop by drop, and the voice can no longer be heard, smack-metal-minute, the odor of a distant suicide… our society is very oriented towards drugs… IBM land of the arts, I placed my ragged lips on your back surrounding silence — I am healed, it took time, today I’m hanging out like anybody else — a trip to Nagasaki… in his paper-maché sky, the Chinatown angel detaches himself from the old universe blue-fish-eye, pressing on the sexy thermostat, reading the blue journal of absence. A long silence among so many others took a census of the void, like starving blood, a prisoner of bubbles swallowing colors in one gulp.
Our wing baggage was light.
(I was told that the weather was fine in Mexico City)… and in the rearview mirror neon-sprays, an electronic solo in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki glance… a blood-flash in electrocuted eyes.

Flower-sob, kid with twisted fingers, smoke and reliefs, blood-filled flowers, a kid in ashes, at the end of night time is sucked again — written in the sky at high tide, faded flowers, faded photos, faded knives, faded stars, a dirty dawn crashes on the city subjugated by screams spat out by syringes, atomized screams vibrating on the skin of time. Curdled blood on photo-rumors, and corner of your broken mouth, so blue — sexy fanfares in the streets of the world, drifting Juicy Fruit Kid, I called this West Saga Desesperanto — empty joints, Heartbreak, a rain-death photo in a boy’s ass… Flower is dead, we’ll never know… a Thursday, joint-ville…
He waited on the pier, near the docks.
Claws tattooing his smile… angel or devil? (we’ll never know.)
The facts — gun shots, then the body falling in the black water, and no one knew why… fair and dark skins… rain, he waited.
Chain smoking — in an instant she went out with the other guy… her body swollen, her face tumefied, she knew, I love you — that night she changed beds and assassin.
The acts?
Molecules of hate… that morning I awake in a hollow, in a dawn of piled high with cramps… supersonic turds in the Frisco sky.

(LAST ETERNITY REEL)
ATOMS AND FLOWERS

Smoke pot in your mother’s womb!…
The purity of their wings, the insolence of their youth… filter-eyes on the always blank page, and a sensual mauve mouth… New York, acts of feeble terrorism and the noise of Import-Export… our revolution’s coming of age… the order of the day “an interesting investment, a spot for the fall of France”… school’s out forever… the planet is losing weight horribly… have you heard about the plot they’re talking about the plot of delinquent intellectuals? (dwarfs invent anything at all)… our revolution is coming of age — do you believe in:
Fresh air, green grass, blue sky, clear & clean water, trees, stars, tribes, crazies, love, peace, electronic democracy, laughter, poetry, freedom?)
If you do it’s okay…
(To write a little every day and we know that rage only exists on earth. Why co-sign the incidents that don’t interest you? A little science-fiction and laser-cameras speak alone)… atoms and some flowers, a little fried music announces a dog’s life in the aquarium… how dawn must suffer! And blue fades… I think of Walt Whitman contemplating the great vegetation of intelligence, blessed are those who chat with millions of gods. Children and sailors will own the skin of insomnia.

Me
I want to live one hundred years
— and more
And purr in the grass

All the radios are covered in frost tonight. It’s late. Odors of wood fires stroll around. Blond tobacco is on the airwaves. Lamps buried in the sand shine with thousands of fires. Scrawny eyes are bloodshot. From now on we’ll be alone, like the gods, always dreaming, in vain, of a universe full of bubbles. Tranquility and silence. Winter’s silence wipes what is left of the 60s with a damp cloth. Parking meters of the Universe groan — Narkophonic Jams… Full Tilt Boogie — waves roll their black wooden eyes, the west wind engulfs the serenity of this beautiful day, I will have to gather all the secrets of next winter.

A HOWL FROM THE SKY IN THE PINK WINDOW.

The neon parade — fire is rising — the planets crack.
Will we escape the violence? (all is possible now)… our wounds are healing, they will go around the world again.
Bodies, blue floats.
Soul, air explodes on the track.
Sex, sperm makes a U-turn.
God, in the air time makes a detour.
Blood, I hate meat.
Bone, the Angel has a hard on and comes.
And we’re going to get fucked on the way.

SO TO GET AWAY FROM THE BURNS
UNDER A SHOWER OF SPARKS

What is a stranger to the soul and the heart shouldn’t be called vision. As the heart says my days have left to wander. That isn’t the way to settle into solitude.
Pollen, blood, come, sweat, shit, singing our first loves, we’ll all go to heaven…TV antennae dance, death TV sucks every vibration… fuck off! Plunge into the universe’s groin! — time’s circles howl, memory’s cavern is a pig sty, God, flamed banana, doesn’t look back, He hasn’t ordered the massacre of stars — Drunk, stoned, meat loaf… flies plant kisses on history’s fat bums, we’re watching the last western, evening, morning, thanx again, God speed, Motherfuckers!… a wild soul needs no dictionary, the body doesn’t need organization, Western at the Entrance to the Sky, Kali Yug Non-Stop, the pink surf of the jungle strangles neon, last electrified minute ten years later, mauve anemones in my sky… highways don’t know that the sky and earth meet sometimes… children steal a piece of cold wind, shadows aren’t crying out tonight. The blind wind and bad omens tie the dream in knots, and the scream of canned currents turns pink.
I sent you flowing to return you to life… just look at Nixon, that sexual disaster, the great white feast of our malediction… I wouldn’t sell a second hand condom to that guy… he would have to leap towards something else, for him to get a second soul, flowered and surrounded by colorful butterflies — that kind of silence erases the image of the Industry of Death, the storm of colors bursts the abscess of absolute power — the crowds’ gravelly voices pollute your skies and your souls. There is no answer to that… huge things begin to live, honed by cold dawn, no-love shows its claws, mob-consciences recoil… words and songs, filthy dentures straddling thought-vegetables… poetry is a rocket, and a free man’s laughter crashes on the launching pad… next summer’s stones will be American, Nutopia… A vague moon will harpoon lotus-words that angels spit out like clots.
What are the poet’s superior logic? The poet is always right, it’s written in the sky, and it doesn’t matter — the poet is both right and wrong, he likes to do nothing, he takes drugs, if he’s an alcoholic, homosexual, criminal, it’s a lifestyle, and this eliminates the opinions of one and the other with no bleeding. It’s what some very young people understand very quickly, thanks to visual/sound avalanches. They are already high in the sky’s dust-covers. But the fact of hitting 40 suddenly, in the prime of life imprisons us in the “they say”, blood flows, laughs and cries all the way to bedazzlement, and blood has only one goal: PUT AN OBSTACLE IN FRONT OF DEATH AND RETURN YOU TO LIFE.
To go down into the abyss of vision, bothering no one, with the angels, madmen, and children, with the pack of dogs we carry within us — Sing to your heart’s content, nebulous panther — echoes write on tattoo-scapes, the sun weeps under the lemon-squeezer, buildings have put on their white dresses and the manhunt is always open.
Fantômas surrounds himself with climbing furs and dawn resembles a long candle born of a dream and sorrow.

I say anything at all
a cry in water
“gimme shelter!!”
an electronic raga in the open sky —
a cry in water

Blood repaints that plump, goitrous landscape. The sky is a wart. Kitchen folklore makes history’s bed. And I, one by one, I pull out language’s ass hairs — City hysteria reaches its paroxysm, let’s not talk about the suburbs’ — Operation “Bad Trip”… We jacked off too often with that revolution idea, Raw Winter blisters drag along and a few flake-screams come down to earth. Circus dogs learn to live in supermarkets… sea foam smothers volcano fires, water flows over words, like a soft nail file on London on a rainy day… The intrepid traveler and the solitary one can’t escape from the landscapes that we created, nor their violence. The robots saw nothing. I won’t make a wish this evening… Who can dream on the traces of fluid time?
London, a rainy day. Time’s tannin tickles the banks of the Thames, silence is ripped open like a tube of toothpaste.
Smoke hesitates between two worlds.
The flame-throwers of Total Censorship control everything, even sexual energy. Censorship causes the propellers of the marvelous to turn pale… the birthmark of a vision… the democratic electronic ear gives you back the songs of a generation… Operation John Cage, “Happy New Ears!”… What can we say? Press the button, pull the chain… they have changed my song… shit-lit stutters in the prompter’s box… Pop-bag misery, today’s tube is awful… TV-dinner knocked, fucked up and zapped in, I like that… Ivy falls in love with old things, and I go on writing to various people, I take walks, discretely I’m bored, I avoid all sorts of people, I hang out, I’m high, I trip, I travel, I don’t make a dime with what I write, others invent words on time;s back.
Operation “Pepsi”, “Beat Your Meat”, good and bad news — catastrophes, bombings, genocides — insects, ghettos, rats, killers, plotters, enzymes, cockroaches, all this comes before man… Which survival projects are you talking about?… The tickets haven’t been reimbursed, they exploded, and God opens His eye, ignoring your prayers… then the Indians lit great fires, burning the words that polluted the Great Plains, the Great Lakes and the shores of the Pacific… Words decimated the Celts, poets and the unstable, but the great patterns of their laughter will break the supersonic sounds that hurt the heavens…
Windows in flames this morning.
Silence — death makes its bed.
Time’s gold is devalued.
The scent of flames listens to what habit says, and it’s midnight, night’s bowl is overflowing.
Death must shut up.
The morning operetta seduces cherries covered with shitty light. It’s Spring. Empty forests pivot on clouds — I know those landscapes very well, they are brutally invaded by sadness — shadows hang onto flowers, weighed down by songs.
Jefferson Airplane a long time ago, Nevada, Colorado… a faded pain sleeps in the sands of the West.
THE SEXY MESSAGE BUZZED IN THE TREE OF SILENCE. Paranoid Blues, pendulum of explosions.
There’s a clock that doesn’t chime, an accumulation of errors, an extraordinary push forward. The masses aren’t against it anymore, they follow as they shit. The incurable backwardness of words doesn’t seem to affect the hopeless revolutionary without a revolution… Zippies and Yippies face each other, that was yesterday… Psychedelic Fascism considers itself in silence, like a period in history… the masses don’t understand that parties and ideologies have no reason for being — the rest sheds its skin, every day technological advances solve our problems — false information shakes the Planet, the universe shudders, freckles disappear… Blue Grass, language can’t foresee the variations/mutations, the body doesn’t reject the vision that sometimes ignores it at times… Chorus of information… On the way things change, and yet everything was very clear, to produce, consume, govern, conserve — flesh pivots on reality — music invades the sky where stars are extinguished.
What are we doing on Earth today?
We’re doing a lot of jacking off. Flakes and flowers disembark. Sketches frozen in the “they say”, the sketch of the drama, of the world.
Time flies and makes you cry.
Pendulum of explosions — blue wounds the shadow — wood enters the fray, unravels the knots of given space, on the way back the signs of the times… An axe posted on the heart of the Punk Zodiac… dice roll on the mirror… the other side is closed forever — nights tighten up, the pliers of the wind whine, you can become familiar with God, neon bleeds night — dawn will be…banana-shadow.
A streak of abstractions pinches the universe. God is having fun. A bisexual God smokes hash. God takes a fix, clasps the blue ropes spouting from the hi-fi channel, bites his nine-string guitar, busts his electric organ… then the catastrophes? Wars?… soundlessly night opens its wings, a slight tremor… the straw man and the man of the street straddled a supersonic turd, patrolling the sky. The survivors don’t carry away any image of that world.
Light images are imprisoned in bubbles, the felt pen has become an outlaw. The media have manufactured everything. The sexy message buzzes in the silence-tree. The scenery collapsed. The ideological services were overwhelmed. Armed bands looted the supermarkets, attacking passers-by savagely, raping young girls, sodomizing boys, set schools on fire, dynamiting subway entrances at rush hour, hordes of dwarfs were setting the world on fire, millions of Chinese children are born between the pear and the cheese… a recapturing of those old harmonies on the screen… The Evil Eye weaves the vines of time.
Bureaucracy believes it’s time to rectify. A flood of precision. The world, seen from Washington, from Paris, London, Moscow, Peking, is entangled in a complex game of war and peace, negotiations, recycling, absorptions… Our Lady of the Snows, an island on the moon and an American flag… I won’t take back what I have said, nor retrace my steps, nor take back what I have not said…
The secret meaning of words lands on the dunes, escaping from the given or received language. I go through the looking-glass whistling a popular tune.
Drunk, God paints the hills and caresses the forests. Blue speeds, without a license, on the highway. Thousands of youngsters flee the grey suburbs only to land in other places, and I’m going to shit as soon as I can. There, that’s how heaven is destroyed, how flowers are poisoned.
Such tatters have built the world.
Operation “Reel Fucks Real!”… hell in the city — a tear engulfed in a surplus of signs in a bone sky — the great tear-basin, Fuji-Mojo, Yin Yang-Tidal Wave, flowers, seeds, fruit, wild animals… the audition is positive… the wind splits in half too, no pun intended… the music of West winds rains in my head, look, look at yourselves, look here and there, for an instant, a little inside and there outside, fast, now, God asks you to live in the raw flesh of consciousness. A poet’s soul enters childhood without knocking, then it wanders, it can’t tune into its birth date, nor in its civil status, nor even to the color of its eyes.
Tonight, near the pond, tenderness overflows. It’s already spring. Everything comes from the trees, flowers, odors, the cries of birds, songs, music and dancing — honey drips into milk — the blue of the sky drinks of pure joy.
Can you hear the public complain? Wind-tears say no comment. Anything heard starts to live according to your nerves. That’s what creation is all about — shooting stars rain down, smiling — A brain turd takes off. Sunflowers breathe and sing. It’s raining.
Mist envelops the hills. The sun is shining. I only have one pack of Camels left, a half bottle of gin, two or three joints, and God never announces His visit)… intervals, zigzags, puzzles, the wind’s hoarse voice seems in a hurry to end it all among the dolmens and menhirs, the fresh wind and its throng of nudes enchants us.
All the landscapes dance in my heads, like the face-to-face that devours us. Elderberry marrow in the honeyed milk, a sun bubble inhales a shadow. I hope it lasts a long time… so, now your slogans?… the Universe must dig it!… The scream swallows itself… blood-orange on a cloud — a rose in the desert, and death, dumb, gaga, hangs out on Earth — blue flashes go bananas and sew up the clouds, and what does it matter whether you’re in New York or Frisco, or in London, Kabul or Amsterdam?… Electrodes spit, and God sees… but will He know what happened on this planet one day?
Blue and orange vapor — a slow shock, soft, deep, liquid, a tingle, a set of geysers, an excess of silence in this quagmire of shadows — God said to me: Man, I would like to die far away from here… Soprano-dick in the English sky… romances, the cosmic prix-fixe and a studio-sneeze… this book of hours was an amalgam of variations, improvisations, tapes and scraps… An island on the moon called Solitude.
It’s red, it’s blue. Music flows under your feet, an image wiggles its hips — St. Ives, Land’s End, Beachy Head, Big Sur, Muir Beach, Mount Bay, Bodega Bay, dispersed beaches and canyons — rocks console each other, images strip in front of the waves.
Operation “Feed Your Head! Make Your Move!” — poem! Mercy! Shanti! Satori! Hi-han! That I am?… every morning wind-bark cries out, sadness collides with you, and misery — just see the star-studded wrinkles of those who have wept so much, just look at the hamburger-mugs of the squares and the militants who have hated too much, look at the average joe, the parvenus, the seedy, look at the lotus murmuring on the lips of those who have loved too much — poets always do several things at once, they dominate speed and slowness, and they are often wrong to play politics… I hear the song of the poor sufferers, I hear the masses of slaves coughing in the dark… Grass takes refuge in the shadow-target. Night shakes itself in front of the TV.

(to be continued…)

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Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 6

August 31st, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu at 10

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

TOBOGGAN-ARCHIVE

TRANS-FUCK EXPRESS. CENTER FOR LIFE & DEATH.

I had noted: Nixon spreads skag shit bugs VD & Death, the great news headlines slip along endlessly.
Toboggan-Archive, an echo-photo of another world. This morning the dew liked to bite. Supreme Cosmos sauce… I listen to the propellers riddle my silence. A mauve sun devours what is left of my sky.
Forests speak that language.
(You don’t go from love to tenderness like that, wind is needed. Especially when roses threaten the stars and want to swallow the Ocean)… pearls dance in cats’ eyes… rain is never careful, it’s no longer in the sky, the moon descends on her silent track.
A few tatters of light play on the walls. Birds defy the hurricane.
(We saw you behind an electric guitar, with an intelligible variable sound). In spurts the coffee pot moans.
Another blue plane high up in the sky.
A blood clot darkens the Ocean.
Faded flowers in the fireplace.
Cymbals, gongs, tambourines.
Twilight’s redness teases the white grass. God is after the slightest information. Traces of winter have remained in the transistors of innocence. A finger of shadows in the grass. Guerilla warfare of nerves and charms.
Somewhat arbitrarily we live in the resonances of yesterday. The dead let themselves be buggered in silence, in front of the mirror, or in an invisible trunk… the others, who keep cool, simper and chatter, charming in their little flowered dresses. Nothing is revolutionized anymore. Radioactive rain falls gently. I have contemplated the stars for a long time, breathing the odor of wild mint, raspberries and strawberries. Owls have settled in the trees around the pond. Wild cats growl on the edge of the path. The forest’s shadow transmits lovely chords — The end of the War of the Roses, a few traces under old stones — worlds unwind, continents collide. An upholsterer’s tack in the planet’s heart. And the wind puts these events in storage… The man from the North lights up in space and time… we express ourselves miraculously, we’re here, with programmed death… no Russian, American or Chinese version, only the livable and unlivable exist… it’s clear and easy to chose… there is only one vision that is opposed to the manipulations of the media. Enemy voices consume as much as we do — we blossom in ossuary-pits — so? To heal the burn, in a showered neon lights, stars and sperm. The brain’s beak is rusty, rotten, things end in cowardly laughter, on the shaky stairway of thought, and I still hear that laughter seizing the ashes of Janis Joplin, Neal Cassidy, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison… black cold is a great block of colors… the landscape can still change, as well as the whole planet and all of life.
The streams are frozen.
Magicians advance across the fields. There will never be enough music or silence.
No gross simplification. We express ourselves. We communicate so as to better understand our environments and our personal spaces. Often, we don’t know what to do with our freedoms and our powers. If all our subversive or nihilistic action…. the violence of robots and hamburger-beings is responsible for all that… it isn’t by chance that their rages are concentrated on Doctor Leary and pot smokers. Empty streets still pretend to believe in reality… vomit of dirty hands used to bear arms… wind is perhaps the pivot of the plot of all the colors, the televised colors of the global village decapitate every ideology. You will find none of that in either newspapers or books.
Doing nothing, the achievement of all poetry — the sky crackles in children’s eyes — surely you=re not going to live on the finger prints of a generation?
Speech is a green banana, penetrated like a dog on the head cheese canape. Anxious, unstable men manipulate God’s toys… it’s hard to be dead, and it never ends… but it’s difficult indeed to live… the Enchanter has gone by… the electrified verb is in the jukebox.
A pure love contract explodes. Native erections in the Bayous. The trees moved last night, and I saw an eye drown in chewing gum… wood, whiter than snow, crackles in the fireplace, shadows hanging onto distant voices, above phallic peninsulas, a draft of air in the silent majority’s fat ass… your eyes are spattered with mouths glued onto napalm, the Magician guides the tide of black stars.
The White God turns bodies into walls, streets into dumps, and starving seagulls devour Black heavens and the silent traces of these millennia. The airport was empty. A few white roses abandoned on a cart. Men are dozing in the bar. Insomnia wrecks the last words of a landscape that will never breathe again. The hairs of silence have nothing more to say.

The four veins of the Atlantic have been bled. The Pacific has shaken the sheets of adventure. Motors sleep between the thighs of girls and boys.
Catatonic neon freezes in the middle of that mandala. Blood fluids buried itself in the chimney.
I’m absorbed by doing nothing.
Love given up, civilized hatred… where are you, beautiful children?… God’s madmen are a few heads taller than you, Walden may be at your heart’s gate but morning glory seeds haven’t extinguished the fires of summer. As the days go by blood’s song rises to the sky, the wind’s mouth swallows the come of computers, all the colors of the rainbow die on the windshield.
Never forget that walls are greedy like the sounds that circulate in the streets of the world. The sun’s flowers stammer and stutter.
TV-Philter, specters, everything is related to table-tennis. Sociologist-sewer cleaners predict the future. We meditate, we play with ourselves, we climb trees, we bark, we babble, we absorb a smile that never leaves us, and we brandish our forks. Today I don’t know the positions of the stars (but, instinctively, I know that the weather will be fine), I contemplate a livable horizon (I know that we won’t all escape violence or injustice), much information broadcast on TV in color floods our brains. Feeling-wise we may be the most poorly equipped of all the animals. Electric and chemical energy program our gestures and our thoughts.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS

A hideous crowd is moving forward. Thousand of beings are dragging themselves on their asses. The crowd is panhandling souls. Descent into hell… (at times I fume, I flip out, I do foolish things, and it chagrins me)… the drums of memory don’t beat anymore for dead souls, naked souls invent simple music, very inspirational… an arrow carries our tears away. Tonight the trees are weeping. Language mixes up every expression. Your domain like mine is made up of scraps, and I am obliged to use some kind of punctuation, a strict order from my publisher and his henchmen… curdled blood on the windowpane, snots, spatterings of brains, blue and white roses… a dawn ceremony.
We’ll eventually see what they’ll say in the transparencies. Silence caresses their sexual stumps.
The world has taken on a disquieting meaning. God has made a success of it. Heaven thanks you. Souls throw themselves onto Madison Avenue’s psychedelic frying pan. Neon is budding, pukes, Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, The Golden Gate Bridge, Big Sur, and the film unreels… (of course, robots and controllers have their reasons that are beyond our comprehension, do you jerks know what’s going on right before your eyes, backstage? No. Well, of course, you’re fools. Don’t ask the Biological Crusher Woman nor the Dialectic Slime. Only wild flowers have answers to everything)… Am I here? Surrounded by filthy beings from another planet and the entrails of the earth, man-fiber!… fourteen years, that’s what’s left after the experts, after me, nothing but a desert!… I’m here, a flipped out Spirou, dawn’s saw teeth pull me out of my sleep.

Juju spied the sexy message and forestalled the massage, a vibrant erection in the warmth of the early morning. Ixca grabbed Juju’s prick and sucked it. Juju held Ixca’s head in his hands, stuffing his fingers into his ears… Peter was jacking off in front of the mirror groaning… Juju pushed deeper in Ixca’s mouth, hit his throat, came violently, shaken by the light. A stream of come flowed from Ixca’s nostrils, like lava. The sexy message bombarded thought. In the heart of a sexual jungle, in unknown territory, the invasion of the limbs-anus-vagina-tongue-fingers-mouths machines — the wind shrieked obscenities to the phallic radars that bordered the highway — the massacre of chromosomes on Cielo Drive, a horrible sexual spectacle, parano-schizo… tele-info and cultural animation… a horse-hair glove bristling with electric needles ransacks the old faggot’s ass… carnivorous lotus flowers… the din overshadows and floods reality, phantoms and specters on the move, tele-manipulation by demons — that is how politics quickly turn into a bloody, absurd, unholy mess — a jet of sperm spatters the maps at headquarters… the Head of State takes off his trousers and his briefs… a short cock, knotty, huge flabby balls covered with red hairs… that unbelievable prick vanished between the thighs of the matron of the Soviet Pentagon — we are now in a drugstore on 14th St., a dark-skinned Hispanic crowd… a young Porto Rican unbuckles his belt, a customer smiles stupidly and expertly slicks the young man’s eyebrows… people come and go… the customer slips a nicotine-stained finger into the zipper, the young man was wearing no underwear… the customer manipulates the minuscule sex — an odor of hamburgers and brilliantine mixes with the innocent games of the streets of New York blessed by neon lights — Sperm Hotel on 23rd St… a Black man pushes his cock into the sheath of a young man from Montana, as blond as a nordic ruin… a phony copy of James Dean is immobilized over the bed — The Black man fucks like a madman, the boy ejaculates, groaning, on the bedspread… Tijuana, a sperm transfusion in a Mexican clinic… ignoble dealing in front of the Sperm Bank — junkies selling their blood… the tragedy is described by a thousand different sounds made by men on the city walls and in the subway — diverse and monstrous noises, shocks, murders, rapes, aggressions, scarves of slimy fog caressing the effeminate adolescents… Exhausted by the New York heat, naked on his bed, Ray was leafing through Silver Surfer. Juju and Ixca played cards and smoked. Juju put his hand on Ixca’s rigid sex. Ida and Hermione were taking a shower… groans of pleasure and purring could be heard from the air conditioning vent… Juju smiled, swallowing his smoke. Ixca knelt and buried his head between Juju’s thighs, moistening Juju’s gland with saliva, then he lay down and Juju penetrated him — a vague erection bothered me for a moment, then I fell asleep — Ida and Hermione, naked on the bed, smoking, whispering, giggling… on the tape-machine Little Pointed Head was playing… Hermione was massaging my cock and my balls, I could hear Juju and Ixca moaning… I had a hardon… my prick vibrated under Ida’s cool fingers… Ida licked my balls and plunged her tongue into my ass — Hermione rose like a balloon and squashed her pussy on my mouth, Ida sucked me — a silvery robot burst into the room… a black hood covered his head, a silvery robot shining in the dim light with thin stripes of pink neon surrounding his transitory, abnormally luscious under his electric flesh… Ida manipulated the neon zipper and pulled out his genitals… a complex assemblage of wires and welds ran from the extremity of his penis at the base of his sky-blue kapok balls that disappeared in the metallic carcass — epidermic reactions in the jukebox at the Electric Circus. With Maria Sativa we lead the robot to Allen’s home in the country — Peter and John destroyed all his batteries and his electronic brain when they had the wild idea of putting a broom stick up his ass.
Very early in the morning, Allen and I went to bathe in the pond, on the edge of the forest of charms. We could talk quietly as we swam. Gregory and Ray Bremser were stretched out under a magnificent maple tree, they squabbled and shouted. Miles, in the middle of his electronic equipment, taped and classified fifteen years of oral poetry and bop prosody… Peter was in the bathroom with his pig that he washed three times a day… with Allen and Mary we crossed the fields, crushing wild strawberries, and at night sitting on the top of the hill, we watched the fireflies and the stars.
Allen, fucking a sacred cow, Peter impaled on a stoned shaddu’s prick, Uncle Fudge tracking the young mothers to milk them savagely — elsewhere some extremists of every sort tried to grasp a wavering power — the wounded robot stroked his sex, and managed, just the same, thanks to an emergency radar to get sodomized by about fifty Hells Angels, while John put on his evening gown, stuck an eggplant up his ass… Gregory, sick, drunk, ranted about the misdemeanors of Jewish homosexuality — Back in New York, the Sperm Hotel… evening papers were strewn all over the sidewalks, old Black winos begged — a young ephebe was having his nipples pierced, turquoise rings were placed on them — boys and girls copulated in the swimming pool… Harry, the Magician exhibited himself for the first time in twenty years… women fled screaming — sexual ricochets on the blue screen hanging above the pool at the YMCA… An electronic Raga, Mantra, the gongs of violence were quiet — back in Big Sur, at a star’s house… Sally and Sinbad were fucking, Ixca and Juju were endlessly assfucking, mouths, twats, asses, pricks, that Norman filmed, vibrators hanging off shoulders — night highway and myriads of erections… Allen straddled a monstrous dong, flying over Tangier, Bill Grey chased Arab faggots brandishing his smoking P.38… pornographic pink pages on the highway… neon saw beautiful landscapes transfigured, but the angels barked in the sky, the angels aren’t happy, and this will drag many beings on the path to death, we must send a registered letter to God, right away… dawn in mourning the wind mentions — water dreams as it shoulders the clouds, God jumps out of bed, slips into his cloud-skin briefs, bursts out laughing and has fun — English twilight always drags an old address along.
DEATH ECHO FILES, TAPE YOUR OWN DEATH TV — hi guys! A salute to you, Neal! Good day Kerouac! Hello Ed! Tom Clark! Ted Berrigan! John Wieners! Hi Brautigan! Giorno! Tom Vetch! Gary Snyder! Goodnight Tom Wolfe! Goodnight McClure! Hello Richard Fariña! — echoes and sprays, clouds broken by winters’ double-bass — cold’s eye has gone mad, memory’s cotton burns — Land’s End, The Last Frontier, Big Sur’s fabulous wind and the Great Plains bring us a few rumors, night flowers eat under water.
Fire dances with white birches. Broken moons weep for Fire-Satan. Moloch’s hideous face weighs anchor in the polyester and aluminum streets. Vertical and static cities have signed their death sentences. Blond mist hangs onto sand — High tide digs up the secrets of men — the Planet no longer juggles with the stars.

COCA NEON KAMERA SUTRA

Julio Navarro invert your field of gravity, top secret”… we sniff danger from a distance. Psycho-explosion, operation SUCK, and sparks spurt from our fingers.
WUUUuuuu! Whup! WrrrRRRoooOOOO! Phut! Thock!
The forces of evil go wild. Signal and posters all over the place : “Mason-Nixon Line”, “Amor Club Buncha Fags”, “No Blacks allowed”… I feel that something is wrong… with the doses we’ve ingested we can never remain on this planet… submerged by three billion Wogs, asphyxiated your own garbage and our cataracts of words and images.
Splat! Szatatt! Yech! Kapow!… an electric sign, “Fuck the Pope! Central Office Building”, Izzy Michel and Ziggy Stardust hiccupped… Thwipp!… a comet is needed to catch up with those yo-yos.
The bomb will explode in a few seconds, and the world will know that we are the most powerful team of transvestites of all times. Obviously the thing is more serious than predicted. But we insist on doing our job, and it won’t be a smell of apocalypse that will stop us… we find ourselves in front of a bay window with walking cadavers, Izzy Michel still has the strength to weep and play the clown. Modesty Blaise, wants to be toyed with by an extraterrestrial above all. How can we go through these walls?… it will be necessary to kill time’s shadow… Izzy Michel was a victim of his own arrogance, he wanted to go to heaven. A panic film has already disfigured him.
Joe Verminex composed the music of “The Young Girl With The Parasol” in front of the sink. Oblivion’s scream drifting in the streets of a dead city, A Land of Wonders, “The Solid Bourgeois Cooking”, and another tango in Paris — my nerves’ soul and the same old electric typewriter — words twinkle DESTINY, POSTERITY,
FUTURE — inertia, boredom has welded the live world, as soon as someone remembers someone or something it means he has not loved well — as soon as a being is animated and loved he discovers insubordination, that’s when circumstances take revenge. Images, fantasies, frozen intersections, tragic autobiographies, etc… and events that become the objects of passionate, idiotic comments. Is any of that necessary? Possible? If yes or no, then why? Dreamed of Warhol and Truman Capote… “Mr. “C” what is man’s basic drama?”… neurotic perspective over Brighton, operation “The Tadpole And the Foetus”…those amalgams of information don’t impress me, my necktie yields to the loud-speaker, an unknown pleasure of someone who has never been able to express himself publicly. The Assassin’s Tango… the victim’s blood reddening the horizon… the dead gods rush into the void.
Fire-spitting clouds. The heavens discolored by cosmic delights.
Joe Verminex plays dead wrapped in silence.
Rumor-blocs and events, born yesterday to fill today and tomorrow. The spectators feed on social placenta, no one wants to untie the knots, no one wants to cross the margin-frontiers, operation “Slimy Alexandrines & Dumb Sonnets.”
We’re in this domain of typewriters and computers. We’re on earth, prisoners
of mental reservations and sentiments. More and more fools according to the laws of chance. The visibility explodes. The raw sounds of cities are ambushed in Willie Lee’s hat. Specters blubber. The astronauts soar in the huge sky. The cosmic ship is an angelic flower.
Operation “Blood & Gold.” The sexual proletariat’s ambitions are changing.
The sexual message is a talking clock, a time zone, a gadget you may even find in heaven. Anyway, if you are on board a cloud, don’t unscrew the time capsule.
Operation “No Objective and no Foundation”. The lonely throngs are having sexual hunger pangs. It’s hard to measure the danger. Those slimy throngs are on the side of the alliance of sentences. Operation “Sperm and White Gloves”, Joe Verminex, the Sea Greyhound insures his bone head for a few million dollars. Operation “It’s Poetic but Expensive,” Operation “God Knows who!” — we’re plugged in and we bark, blood circulated in the echo room, we’re in straight jackets, and the writing-wonder goes back to work. We won’t be able to resist the crossbreeding of words. We already have grey times — torn figures and broken lines of association.
And death that takes all will not return…
The unbearably devastating daily grind, the mechanical ballet, the electronic legend, death-TV, the spontaneity of technological ideologies and everything in the sewer… contradictions don’t astonish me anymore, I have other dreams to live through… we have to do, as if we were alone in the world, do and undo, acting in favor of solitude — we’re haunted by the question of truth, it’s often ugly and ragged — nausea and grief, despair, indifference, stupor. No abstraction can be made of them.
The weather is fine. Day is breaking. Flowers are waving at me. Birds and squirrels are playing dominos.
The weather is fine. Daylight locks us in.
The sick screen is flushed with color, crackles, we see Nixon, Pompidou, Brezhnev, Asshole & Co… a flat, livid face rehashed yesterday’s and today’s news… a state of supreme indifference dominates, we find our goods all over.
In every scream there is a taste of sky.

THE LAST BULLET “IN EACH SCREAM THERE IS A TASTE OF SKY”

The Universe is starved for life. We’re here, in front of the video library of the Universe, in the middle of flames and flowers. The Brain Police has invaded every cerebral territory. We’re thoughtlessly confronting the reasons that permit us to exist, where the dead gods were sitting… vibrations and the harmonies are rooted in environment-space and program the management of cerebral territories.
Operation “The Future of Mankind.” Political manipulations, appropriate propaganda, bureaucratic and technological dictatorship, all this exceeding the left or the right, relics of the XIXth century, slime made up of slogans, archetypes and cliches, televised smears.
If we want to survive we only have two choices.
a/ ASTRONAUT.
b/ AQUANAUT.
And it may all depend on mutations caused by Sexual Affairs.
A few half-witted hippies swim in the Vision Ditch, it’s always the same story, the Gospel According to Your Neighbors or to each His Own Truth, Beards and Hair, etc… operation “To Not Mow The Lawn…” That is the firing of a writer… it’s not a question of landing in Venice with a cardboard suitcase… The technician writes the word DEATH on the screen… Rumors from the city tell us nothing at all. The madness of mankind is mentioned a lot, “drugs” and sexuality, they mix everything up, and only the blind repression that strikes us is the same.
Cold or passionate, the technician knows what talking means in police language. We’re in Orange Studio and we send sexy messages to distant galaxies.
There’s no doubt, all these messages come from space, and we’re here, in time, we’re not in space. We’re all old Death TV.

Black lianas, coppery anemones… vertigo… the letter and the spirit of the law… it was yesterday… I disappear in a burst of laughter. “Linguistic Divorce SVP.” Extra-divine version of the historic nightmare. The event, man, chance, necessity, the global village, television turned into an outcry, vision, the soul.
We yield very quickly, we listen to space.
The old world is behind us, maybe, maybe not.
We’re going to write in lights, in radio-waves, in radar-waves, and we’ll leave time. I get on my ergonomic bicycle, and free-wheeling I race to the House of Sausage. I benefit by a general impression. The SS in skirts organize the operation “Renewal of the dialogue We’re Going to Free the Lawn And Chop Off The Balls of Faggots,” in fact it concerns operation “Soup A La Grimace”… on the moving sidewalks, mute, stunned, thousand of diplomaed citizens, recessed, give themselves up to work, GIVE THEMSELVES UP, what an expression!… what promiscuity… they advance, stumble, gesticulate, fight, crawl, and they endure that silence because they are all alike. Ugly smiles of several generations. And the rest emerges, as if by magic.
A taxi crammed with dwarfs rushes towards the subway entrance.
That was yesterday.

Some claim that traveling is useless — I don’t claim a thing, I don’t even take sides — I have no solution to propose to you, not even a suggestion, just complete indifference… you wander in a forest of fists with no hands, with phantoms… Operation “Nitty Gritty Dirt Band”… a thorny question… to create another paranoia, an antisocial, unadapted schizophrenic being, by affirming that your reality is the only reality… metabolism reversed, sabotaged, muddles and firedamp explosions … Operation speed freak… I press on the handle held together by nylon threads and I open fire on the dwarfs and the sexual proletariat, and all those dressed in their Tarzan costumes.
“Watch Out! To your stations!…we’re going to change galaxies.”
“We’re in our own bubble, we’re entering sub-space, lower your heads and fasten your belts…”
WHAP! ZONK! SLOOoooosssh!
“You look sad.”
“I dread catastrophe, the ecoshit, you know?”
“I only dread that the duo love…”
KRRRIIiiiissss! CRASH! BANG! WOOW!
“Good Lord! That voice…”
“Get lost! Shut up, punk! Crapman was here…”
“Silence, amigo, if you feel like laughing, tickle yourself…”
“Flash Gordon! You, here!!!”
“You miserable cocksucker! What can your power do against the Controller’s?”
“Eat shit, you motherfucking cunt!”
Fasten your seatbelts! According to my calculations the planet we’re looking for is straight ahead…”
“Tough shit! Gosh!”
GURK! YUK! MEAP! MEAP! MEAP!
Operation “Night of the drums”, rendezvous at Pompano Piazza, keep left please. Operation “Fascist Follies”… “We’re almost there, unfasten you seatbelts”…
CRASH! TWANG! THOK! VRRRrrrroooooooooo!…

I’m drowning in a secret smoke. Neon cracks as soon as you stir the metabolic ashes of the planet. Neon strangles itself. NEON-GALLOWS IN THE STREETS OF THE WORLD.
(I’m not comfortable in Van Gogh’s shoes, nor Anne Frank’s and those of Pope Jeanne’s. I’ve never felt comfortable in the shoes of others — that was yesterday… today it’s a matter of coming to the surface… I don’t feel comfortable in the middle of these spurts of community living. In truth, I don’t feel comfortable anywhere, except here at times, and in Big Sur. But there are the shit-makers…I don’t have to explain, but I’m willing to exchange a future fag for a heartbreaker.
A firing-squad festival, also a psychiatric hospital one, concentration camps too, model prisons and pilot factories… an orthodox brain, an autonomous prick and a cosmic grimace… it’s a matter of fertilizing space, of getting away from the walls where we dreamed for such a long time. Kilometers of noises. The songs are heard all over. The sky’s spare parts have gone on a honeymoon. Prophecies come out of the jukebox and sing inside the almond-night. Neon has lost its strength.
There were many of us on the cotton reef.
John Deeper doesn’t answer anymore.
Flash-echoes in the streets of the world.

A DROP OF SKY IN A SONG

The Cosmic Hooker, frustrated and joyless, accepted to meet the Unknown Banana. She exchanged a few practical details concerning the operation”We’re not shy at all.”
The Electric Phantom of Technopolis, paradise and battlefield, as I’ve already mentioned… On the walls, or on a wall of pink paper roses, between two blizzards,
during that black spring, deploying the Polaroid rainbow over the reality-pit… there where musicians land, in the scream of a needle… jostling the cop-excrement.
A billboard, COCA NEON, and you find yourself in total reality.
Semantic traps are dangerous. You can always ask — A flower, a blue flame, a trip and it’s over, you come back or not. It’s happened — we’re inside our own bubbles, irresponsible, and frequency-souls howl, and the Cosmic Hooker standing in front of the pinball machines of the past seduces the co-pilot… I see it all from the interior, towards the unknown… and the gentle typewriter yells: SAUVE QUI PEUT!!!… Images of cities burning on an ordinary pillow, there where a whole generation was sitting. Death TV is new skin.
The naked and the dead, frozen on the background of a dazzling cipher, life, between two worlds, you could be mistaken… language stairways, Mexico, so white, between two silences… we hand you VCRs and the riddled arms, we know that you have nothing to live for, that you’re frozen, wandering in this old world, closed, voiceless, it was yesterday, DESESPERANTO… suffering installs it’s transistors.
Who is talking here?
The electrocuted articulate one or the colorless length of a scream?
I went through someone in the disorder of skins.

Dumped with all the bubbles, steamed, with seaweed faces and old photos, along with invisible intersections.
A corner of blue sky… the dream abyss.
Were you ever in the Sperm Hotel? in contact with the cold… a cure, don’t you think?… to eat at night with a rootless drifting body, with embryo goiters…
Operation “The Vice Of Living”. Space maneuvers in a swimming pool — orange mist, TV antennae shine on the musical urinal — sexual odors on the windshield, distant explosions, sexual hostages… our world is swaying with dimmers (one day, you’ll understand what atomized means)… On the screen, burned faces and colorless toys.
The dwarf wanted the floor. We sent them a specter. Then cameras let the toxic gases out.
Assemblages of something… Operation “What’s Said About It”… a dumb smile between your legs… jumbles, dreams, all sorts of worlds to vomit, KARMA TANTRIC DIABLO. Black and red ants unite… the invisible insurrection of millions of brains of the Grey Generation.
Some dwarfs dressed in blisters patrolled the streets.
It was yesterday. It was tomorrow.
It was obvious.
The blue of the earth filled the screen.
The astronauts are very calm.
The planet’s sex, turns over by itself. An alarm signal whistles at the void — on the arm of absence that lightshow widens consciousness — yesterday, the dream was erased, the war was over… today you are the heads of the publicity of your paranoia… WORDS AMONG THE IMAGES, IMAGES AGAINST WORDS… doers, imitators, woodlice, these are our successors… they crawl in puddles, in the juice of what is left of 60s — let’s light another cigarette, pour ourselves a pint of dark beer, two fingers of whiskey, and lets jack off among the burning images.
A physical and verbal truth that Death TV reveals to us.
The planet is about to explode!!!
We don’t have much time left, that’s obvious, or isn’t, but where are we? We’re at the spacial disco, we’re in time, we’re not in space. Operation “Solitude It’s Always Sunday”… we’re here, gelatinous rats, fascinated by tricks and games… neon-bodies and impulsions, we’re going to decode the sexy message.
We’re here, with our words, near the shadow, in bright sunlight, in the wind, with volumes of visible nature, running across green pastures, velvety, facing the intense rage of images.

The seeds are thirsty.
Silence is about to bleed the loving teeth of stardust white. Here, landscapes tell that nothing is easy, everything is pathetic, the whole earth’s visible in a body, and that’s logical. Robots yell at death, the others do it too, dwarfs and degenerates dream of sailing for Utopia.
Violence, violence, violence… hideous young people play with death in the Snow Subway.
Terrifying, I agree, it’s terrifying, like that jungle of shanties and suburbs full of steel and trash cans. Girls and boys seek a little bit of warmth, a little bit of love — then militants and moralizers appear, closely followed by evil genies and their poison pens, they rummage though young bodies, and the notion of sin takes the upper hand — bloodthirsty greys open fire on the flock.
A direst experience for the being along with Cowboy Alpha.
Swirls, multicolored streaks, strings of fears and stamping… whenever you wish… don’t hold back… don’t beg for an orgasm from empty statues — all the signals circle reality — empty transparencies the curtain is torn before your very eyes. Opal with her million eyes reappears in a bone sky.
The Cancer Promenade, Multicolored Death, Death TV, The Vampire State Building, NASA’ orange-blue views, raw meat cities… it was yesterday… a trapeze artist on the wire hurries to sabotage the merry-go-round. The planet’s menagerie doesn’t have much time left.
What have you gotten from dictionaries?
Your name? X, unadapted idler, well, it’s still better than no one!…
Laughing eyes tell you that almost nothing is left.
You’re still lacking two magic eyes to illuminated that brilliant speech.
It’s raining, hailing, nothing is counter-nature. Nothing is true. All is permitted. I’m not even up to appreciate this or that. ALL IS TRUE, NOTHING IS PERMITTED — eco-catastrophe (the ecstasy of blue on wild strikes) frost drowns my projects, the fire is spreading — what a great silence today!
I’m sitting in the afternoon’s flame, an organ-shaped mouth is qualified as the most somber, a bouquet of twats around the xylophones, fire spreads in the firmament. A drop of sky in a song…

A SCREEN RIGHT IN THE SKY

The word’s hurricane-lamps holds back its tears…
Silent figure, bloody wood sighs, all this never ends… cries, rasps and tears that we comb, dress like songs composes during the summer, that we make up like refrains carried away on dead waters… “Getting soft Rocking Man, Insurrection Of A Million Minds”, starched clouds weaving a neon-souvenir, a pink smile in the blue sky, it’s really simple… the weather is fine… the river’s waters are clear, period.
A white wave looking like a shadow. I’m not going to complicate something so simple. I enter the Universe shattered. Operation “Here’s something To Jog The Molecules, Zip’s PUZZLE DEATH, the new porn — the earth has painted her lips, and oranges venture behind the horizon, here, a faded violet, there, an open book — a star dances on a fresh mint geyser, the sky is gloved with hail.
The poet doesn’t live in another world. The shadow doesn’t speak about its flirtations. I only listen to the void turning, beyond silence… flowers scatter their secrets… I have no regrets at all. What about you?… What a silence in the abyss-margin!
Why are you so sad? (sounds of voices thrown out by reality) — anecdotes are nourished by scrawny cold, dew murmurs — bees follow the path of herbs, and everything that has been said can be expressed differently. Why are you so sad?
Hawthorns want to laugh. On the edge of the path, among the wild roses, naked squirrels dance, silence laps the mauve of the hills. Hokusai and his waves don’t know where to go anymore — a crumpled sun, frozen spray on the mirror — snow embroiders on landscape-skin, target clouds dance on black ice.
A hole in the forest, grass forges its beast-thought.
A cigarette in which one hundred flowers swing.
Hawks haven’t heard the sky’s lace groan — the weather is fine, with his finger in his eye the militant stomps the flowers — I’m not one of YOUR compatriots… oh! Shit! A guy who invents sentences, and all nature chuckles… Yes and no, a show that shouldn’t be missed — busting your balls is a trump card in life, all the same… a drop of sky in a song, I am a fan of my own fantasies… neon flesh growing like virginia-creeper.
Spirals. Inflation. Back-stage discussions. Secret negotiations. Rumors of hot or cold wars. With a closed mouth the light breeze sets fire to the mirror.
I offered a tri-colored Tampax to Miss America with a fire-cracker inside, then the flowers deployed their songs, and all the women in the world shook in the rowboat of my heart… brutes, punks, sprites on the chessboard — true silence built those cliffs and rocks, dawn’s stones announce the deluge — silvery waves, fire lines in the gumdrop sky, the Universe grinds its teeth, thunder buzzes on the snow. Broken images, engulfed by night, a forerunner sign jostles the hurricane lamp, I close my eyes… time is brutally beaten by a blue cigarette… Unknown colors in the watershed of light.
Should space remain cold the world will be entirely put to music and into spoken archives.
We spoke for everyone and I tremble as I re-read the journal of my life, the colors warm me, silence spreads, time-slobber — what is happening in my life? In yours? Uh-um in a cloud turned ugly. I’ve planted thousands of flowers, and all those seeds were buried. Spring spits in the air and deplores its terrible fantasies. The wind has cool hands. Rain jumps over the dunes. Music grows a mountain flower that signs dawn. Blond streets were glassed in by the laughter if bulldozers. A mechanical piano is burning in the moonlight — laughter gets its fill of tears — the day is made endless by a hedge of voices…
“Stoned dreams” — a bouquet of sparks sobers the red robin… the cat gives up smiling… a little dew on the screen. God doesn’t have any luck. I guess, in the long run, that nothing is easy — sitting idle, the shadow plays among the branches of the Japanese cherry tree — all this excites thinking… a cold bomb weeps on the blank page… God will be the historian of flowers, and I will be enchanted to become those two drops of water… this doesn’t explain that… toasted bread absorbs honey and butter… the consumer spits in his own ear — a crescent moon in the sky, fog plants its thorns on the mauve hills (we’ve known moments when the situation seemed desperate, and you can be sure of one thing, this doesn’t explain that)…
Chains of words and images unconditioned the word.
Blunders of DEATH TV, and with that form of life the head is first.
THE HORIZON CRACKS. THE SUN SPITS OUT A WET STAMP.
The sky, barely reddened, opens up with fiery songs.
Day is breaking.
Blond fields streaked with quick-silver.
A grimace takes the place of TV news.
The sun’s mane has nailed a cloud on imagination. The world breathes. We breathe. A minute of silence in the wake of images — beautiful emeralds in the empty alleys — day is breaking, gold streams onto the lawns… It’s hard to trap a moment, poets know this all too well… the sidewalks of King’s Road blossom, huge neon stars drink the city’s tears… bombs, explosions, murders, fights, aggressions, the Industry of Death tricks life and ventilates great puffs of hate — robots close their eyes on reality, the four seasons wear no panties… the sky’s mouth hits the white of the eye and devours my comix.
EARTH!!! EXIT FROM DREAMS — (written crossing fields)…
Horizon-pages, 6 am…
The weatherman said visibility would be difficult — rain, wind, and time going by so fast… the wind weeps above the black wheat and floods the heart-mirror of this morning — the wind invade the slumber of my cats, and between its fingers it does a somersault.
Poplars look as if they are taking a walk.
The mist is trying to blur the landscape.
Laughing, tiny details collapse in front of the flowers.
— a neuro-psychiatrist was running in the grass, etc., etc…. an odor has already joined the immensity — and that is where I sat down in the fresh grass…

(to be continued…)

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Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 5

August 30th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Mary Beach & Claude Pélieu

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

A PROGRAMMED DREAM

The technician sprays toxic and lethal gases. The CEO shuffles a few pages and starts to speak.
“Gentlemen, the American astronauts will return in perfect shape, SKY LAB is a success. We’re at the dawn of the year 2000, and our enhanced gadgets don’t fight with the flow of history, besides that isn’t the problem, the problem is, uh, well let’s say that it is extravagant, if it be that our capitalist society that permitted the expansion of all consciousness and our trips into space”… applause… “that our society allowed the most audacious arts to infuse new blood into a whole generation, and that thousands of young people, among our finest technicians, were able to experiment with every kind of drug in spite of the uh-prohibition, well, I think that unadapted people have a right to happiness and the Freudian plus-value… Marxists have disgusted the youth of every country, and now we must adapt, change, and ALL that, Gentlemen, we can only go forward, with more and more freedom”… Applause… “so, I say , that those who wish to enjoy their incredible backwardness, take no part in the democratic brain trust, the exercise of liberties that democracy demands will have nothing to do with their aberrant convictions and their nostalgia… Oh, I know that the war machine can still function, but it can’t really affect us… even the Western proletariat loots the Third World”… laughter… exclamations… “Gentlemen, there will be no revolution in the sense that the stupid left wingers understand it, and I think that it is unbelievable luck for the revolutionaries, and, besides, I think they will soon realize that the bastards weren’t those…”
“There were ants in the hearse!”, exclaimed the union delegate.
“Oh, you, that’s enough, go and tell that to your flocks!”
“I even wonder if there will be a few fine days for us”, murmurs the Prime Minister sitting in his bathtub, contemplating his little celluloid boats.
“Those eyes undress you! Justice is done!”, yells another delegate.
“I accuse!” grunts the doorman visibly drunk.
“Just the justice of the people…”, the character hidden behind a curtain doesn’t finish his sentence. A ton of sadness spreads throughout that congress. Joe Allegro, one of the principal stockholders wasn’t there.
The CEO continues…
“Calm down, Gentlemen, calm down… Let’s see now, what the youth market is offering us… but let’s not take Europe into account, except for Great Britain… popstars are committing grave errors, they confuse the mud of abundance with the gold of time… those new myths, uh, for better or worse, hey we have our own fantasies, don’t we?… I mean the popstars aren’t profitable anymore… no more than anti-missiles, warheads with multiple heads, orbital bombs, carriers or missile interceptors, no more than the bacteriological and psychochemical offensives, only meteorological projects that provoke climatic catastrophes hold our attention… but will our environments resist the escalation?”…
ACTION — general rehearsal in underdeveloped zones. Objective No 1… who cares, they’re not White… experimental non-violent repression on trial in urban and suburban volumes… ACTION… nothing to fear from militants and diverse groups… Hippies have found jobs and have grown old… universities, fashions, research, advertising, Dick Tracy, TV, etc, nothing to fear from liberated bourgeoisie, nothing to fear from western Communists… ACTION… we’re going to be able to liquidate our Madison Avenue MGM and RCA stocks with the retarded Europeans… ACTION… population explosions, global segregation… we won’t tolerate official subversion, and all that seems quite reasonable to us.
Let’s not forget to emphasize vacations and leisure, that’s really a revolutionary act… right and left wingers are under our control, those retarded minority layers are living their last minutes, let them rot… ACTION — no more classical repression, liberate those Blacks, all of them, quickly reclassify those suicide candidates… besides we have the time to see it happen.
“A little blue flower in the red flag, Sir?”
“Thanks, young man, I’m a socialist of the belle époque…”
“And what about me, I’m left wing, and I feel good in my skin…”
“I’m right wing who feels good in the world…”
“And you, young man? At your age, one feels good anywhere, no?”
“You? Yes, you!”
“I’m legitimately worried, oh, not a theoretical anxiety, no crisis, no… anyway, I hope it lasts…”
“A very fine statement concerning reality, my dear, remind me of your name?”
“And you, continue to campaign in my favor…”
“You know, there are discontent people all over…”
“Well, good night, I’m overjoyed, at least, you know what you’re talking about…”
“Well, good night, let’s say that we live in a world difficult to understand…”
“You know, a new washing machine, a new color photocopier are much more important than the riots in the ghettoes, besides, look carefully at the screen , do you see that street? Those young people singing the International in Paris and in Tokyo, well, the police does its job well… we’ve acquired the exercise of democracy and liberty, don’t throw that unique acquisition away…”
“Of course, the obsessions and neuroses of individuals with collective unimportance don’t interest us, not important if he takes her in the ass or in the urinal? with or without peppers? We’re free, you got it?”
ACTION — a green flash pushes the travelers back into yesterday, the last stop for the managers of the revolution, dream chronicles, we didn’t believe in it anymore… a sexual howl in the bloody trunk, silence, music, big lights in the pink window… We don’t give a fuck about their sexual problems, here, we light up inwardly, we come or not… we aren’t going to start over — English twilight carries an old address around, a few pissy bubbles burst in the sun — there are no surprises upon waking up…
A honey echo, emotion as pure as a drop of dew.
The sky unfolds its cloth. A cowboy song comes out of a jar full of mint leaves. Cassettes sing-song, televisions split, the shadow loots mirrors.
There’s nothing left, we’re on the brink of vacillating with neon… no explanation need be given to one or the other, you can’t change their lives or transform their worlds against their wills… ACTION — recoil instinctively… A hanged man lifts the curtain and shits in the prompter’s box, and before the three knocks reveals his stiff prick… a CEO shows off, stars are startled in the sexual mist… artists and revolutionaries become more and more indispensable to the established order — what is happening in the world? nothing, not much, every subject haunts the Universe, mutant-clairvoyants advance — without a look at the blind terror and conformity sleepwalkers and robots go to the cashier. What more is there to say?

THE GREAT FUCK

Ray lifted Ida’s legs to examine her twat. He was on his knees, caressing the plump mound covered with curly nut-colored fur. He put his hand between her thighs and gently caressed her clitoris. She disengaged herself, turned over, and lips bumped into Ray’s penis who was sucking her conscientiously. Rapidly a sharp pleasure made him shudder. His prick was completely in her mouth, and he managed to return her caresses. Then he took her alternately in the butt and the cunt. They came together enjoying the same delights, discharging painfully… Hermione entered the room and covered them with her lips. Ida grabbed Hermione and sucked for her for a long time, shoving her tongue like a serpent in her streaming cunt. Ray didn’t take long to get hard again, and he serviced Hermione the same way in the ass and cunt. Then he spread her thighs roughly, Ida took his cock between her lips, and at the same time finding Hermione’s butt, she shoved two fingers in her rectum… then tickled her with her tongue… they were abundantly wet and Ray fucked Ida, her cunt swallowing his cock, Hermione caressed Ray’s balls, then they came like madmen, fainting with pleasure.
The boys (when they weren’t jacking off among themselves) were assaulting girls all the time. That sexual misery, and the many forms of repression, doesn’t, I think, have much to do with class struggles, in spite of what they say in informed circles… The photocopier replaces the orgasm and Xerox brings another kind of civilization to us… flabby thinking is diffused by ideological services only impoverish sex and its market — pathetic symphony in the crappers of high schools and stations — a mammoth explosion shakes the planet… repression and transgression appear simultaneously, speech is completely shattered, unpredictable reactions begin and end in the present, and spread over events and environments… the dominant structures of a system that strangely resembles the one created by groups that are hostile to it… Death and come remain in their throats, the better and the worst are in their heads.
The Japanese cop who arrested Juju in Los Angeles was also a pianist, a pure artist floating in the sunset in Surf City.
Early morning stratus flying over nuclear installation in New Mexico.
An ignoble attack forces a national spermatic emission to flow.
ACTION — the deposed emir was jacking off in a bordello in Timbuktu, while the stoned Fedayeens shit in his oil wells. In Zurich silly Hippies demonstrated for peace — a video orgasm pushed back the neo-Nazi counter-demonstrators… there are dreams we don’t remember, and that’s a good thing… On the sexual battlefield of sleep, the dreamer is plunges into a bath of vapor… the most committed militants are never really taken seriously, especially by their adversaries… reactions are mixed.
ACTION — young, rather ugly and ungainly girls go door to door selling, an explanation campaign, the pill, abortion, social security, the friend of the foetus, the great zygomatic, etc… lesbians exhausted by street fighting, attack lonely men and emasculate them, left wing housewives organize a faggot hunt… “all this is comical and quite enervating,” said a liberal who contests the sisters’ capabilities — Paulo, an ex-motorcyclist who had become a rock singer in a suburban nightclub, organized very special gang-bangs with innocent girls… he would deflower them with his Bic pen and cut their cracks with his teeth — drowning in grease spots and used Kleenexes, Paulo rushed forward and glided, yelling with pleasure on his toboggan incrusted with dildos. Billy Bud traveled with his sexual demonstrations packed in a suitcase… grave consequences between the lines of risky strength… I hummed the latest tune, “You’re dirty but you’re handsome”.
ACTION — a young man smoked leaning against a billboard. Bare chest. pre-faded blue jeans and red leather boots. Black hair cut very short. His flabby lips were surrounded by pubic hairs. Ray felt a little sick… a light breeze played in the silvery-green eucalyptus foliage. Onan City was lit up. The Frisco Bay, and over there, further on, Oakland, crushed by the lights of Berkeley… Ray thought that, in fact and in spite of everything, that it was better to live in New York or in Los Angeles, even London, with the conduction of being able to jump in a plane, every week, and fly into the heart of the Blue Mountains, or onto the beaches of the State of Virginia… Sexual extinction and curfew, police and military patrols and all the anxious and badly built people ready to lynch you… Ray and the boy were standing on a pontoon… accidentally Ray’s hand touched his belly. The boy’s hand grasped his cock, and he fell on his knees, his warm lips closed over Ray’s prick, his tongue caressing him slowly — the seagulls squawked — Ray held back, a trembling hardon, shuddering as he stroked the shaved neck, digging further into that delicious, exciting mouth. Ray couldn’t hold on any longer and he discharged in five long pulsations. The boy swallowed his burning come, groaning and suffocating. Then they stretched out on an inflatable mattress. Ray took off his blue jeans, stroking his tiny balls, as round as plums. They kissed and Ray tasted his own sperm — Another hardon. The boy’s penis was small but adequate… Ray jacked him off delicately and with his other hand caressed his ass, the assholes of the unknown kid dilated, retracted, and Ray took him in the ass, back and forth in the luscious scabbard. All around, young people were caressing each other, buggering, couples were fucking furiously, moaning and crying under the orange and black sky, blotted out by the San Francisco neons. Heavy waves break against the rocks and the surf came to caress the barge.
Operation “IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO SEDUCE”… last reel… we’ll never talk about it again… the ration of time for solitude is no longer available.
I was Ray a long time ago, straddling a piece of ice. Finished in a reanimation booth. Finished in the American zoo. Rowing in olive oil and a hot fudge sundae, straddling a Polaris-turd, celebration Valentine’s Day with the red dykes.
Red dimensions bursting through the haze, set the nylon landscape on fire. God tried to photograph something, like the Abyss Gang.

ASSASSINS WORK OVERTIME

Notices and small posters, it’s forbidden to throw beer cans into the barbed wire. Paint your ghettos green, Jazz up your hovels with psychedelic posters, avenging posters were plastered on the walls of the city, along with the usual publicity, so subversive and demented.
A gigantic prick pierces the clouds and showers the city with cosmic sperm, an intergalactic anus defecates on the creations of man.
People fight in the streets.
There is obviously another solution, Stoned Intersection, a shabby hotel room, an unmade bed, greenish sheets, sachets of heroin, spoons, syringes, matchbooks, cotton balls, speed and barbiturates… all that shit spread out on the bed… I smoked a bit, I had a few bennies, and I left… in a bar I drank five or six Vodka martinis… I felt better… I could no longer look at those bits of blood-stained cotton, those eye-droppers full of coagulated resin, those filthy needles, I could no longer see those guys and those girls, nor — the hell of heroin, coma, cramps, grey flashes stirred inside bubbles, the withered, pierced veins under your abscessed flesh — if we could only use a telecommunication satellite to wholly film and project at random the arrival of bubbles, overdose fixes, and the thousands of junkies in a single flash, any old pad, on any old continent, in any old highschool can, in any old prison… ACTION — I see a guy getting a fix in San Miguel, the needle trembled, the great mondo vision shot, and all the maniacal mythology of the universe of drugs… everyone should know that … Nothing happens, nothing in that universe, as soon as that filth has hooked you for good… five tons of rotten heroin is consumed in the USA in a year, poisoned LSD, over-priced grass is trafficked, murderous amphetamines, synthetic alcohol… a grey scream in the cold dawn where a thousand transparent silhouettes vacillate. The leprous anxiety emerging from the fog laden with metallic dust, a vague shock in the gelatin, shattered multicolored neon swimming in black blood, desolate and sinister zones of survival and panic, sticky wrinkles, slimy clots of sadness, a vague shock, the embers fry you vertically. If it tempts you, amuses you, engulfs you now in the Snow Subway, in the artificial dawn soaked by the blood of thousands of junkies bursting into torches, those thousands of suffering people who have no stories to tell, like Murphy and Floyd, dead for such a long time, with Skag and Jones, officially lying in the morgue for little powder mixed by Mol & Mort… I left that shabby bar and I smoked two joints in the parking lot. Then I took a taxi.
Like many people Doctor Rubin was undecided and troubled.
A rock group, The Fat Flower, and the demonologists of the Pentagon were dazzled by a porn lightshow staged by THE Wet Dykes.
A tear on the screen — the actor Pierre Clement is condemned by an Italian tribunal for usage and possession of drugs, the funeral of a Catholic priest in Ireland, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti make a stop over in Honolulu, President Nixon stops over in Alaska, fights in Paris, Milan and Rome, John Sinclair is freed, wave of arrests in the countries in the East, murderous fights between Palestinians and Israelis, clamp of tension over the whole planet, a Soviet poet leaves a psychiatric hospital, declared cured by the authorities — in the minds of one and the other all the battles were either won or lost, their demanding formulas chase reality.
A soulless doll passes in front of the automatic distributor of condoms, two guys argue about a parking spot.
Images created by ideological services experts lean on a network of contradictions. Once again I was right, and so were you. A network of absurdities. as some consumers might say, consumers who have views about everything and nothing, like you and me… As soon as they organize your leisure they’re persuaded that they have freed you. A rebel in a coma speaks to us of the inconsequence of democracy. “I don’t know anything and don’t want to know,” he repeats fiddling with his paint bomb.
The Wet Mops, a symphonic orchestra attacks the first measure of Kibbutz Flower.
“Assassins work overtime!”
A veteran, tied onto his emergency chamber pot with security belt and all, cries out:
“Let our dead sleep in peace!”
A grey and brown rainbow, large flakes of grated cheese fall. Operation ‘GAMMA SUCCESS GUARANTEED’, cops and demonstrators are absorbed by electromagnetic vibrations and plunge into infrared and ultraviolet.
Chromatic information passed under the noses of a generation too preoccupied with choosing clothes at the Oriental Pearl. The information agents didn’t have much to do, if not to film, tape, classify and transmit. The electric activities of poets were drowned in adrenalin, they felt no dangers for the established order. (It was sad to see them talk gibberish on stage, holding greasy bits of paper in their hands, sputtering in mikes smeared with Dijon mustard, sad, in spite of total consciousness and the Immense Trip they are incapable of explaining to the world in which they find themselves)… it pleases me to see those guys embark on a pierced raft for a long cruise…
ACTION — the Sperm Hotel, Chelsea… artists, militants, dealers, CIA and FBI agents, crazies, Puerto Ricans whores, and Cuban drug-dealers… the situation deteriorated quickly, the belle époque was over, musicians went elsewhere, everyone was perfect… rapes, murders, break-ins, regrettable incidents, absolutely disgusting people took care of business… At all times New York was considered to be a dangerous city, like all the other large American cities.
A pink taste in that cruel glance. A vision of the world transcends pinball machines on 42nd Street. The old film must be decoded. An intestinal occlusion that tends to replace any important cultural contribution… The CIA agent, long hair, black shades, etc., at the bar, exploiting Chibas= gestures… the bursting open of an old film and of conscience is the starting point of the arrival of blocs of association, that return at random, after the seen and the heard, hoping to make you smile.
A jazzy goodbye buried in the jukebox in this filthy dive, the El Coyote… all that ruins memories, a metabolic shock caresses twilight, like a spurt of sperm falling in flakes on the worn bath mat, a soft noise, a grey sound.
As soon as you exaggerate and you take your desires for realities you start to invent. We catch all the signs drifting among reflections of waves whispering on the edges of clouds.
“You’re making fun of my body!” cried Lola Pozo as she readjusted her veil. That poor drag-queen was aging badly, her acting clothes were faded.
That day, returning from Las Vegas, I noticed that the old Beatniks were resurfacing again, betting on the Hippy market, that all the crazy exiled avant-garde of the 50s were escaping from the Jewish psychoanalysts waiting rooms, and that it was really touching bottom… a neurotic and romantic wind blew in the halls of the hotel, not to mention the bad smells. Daily low blood pressure, filthy beings, eroded by rages and hatreds, and the hideous sounds of 23rd Street… things go so fast that questions and answers telescope, and that double vision turns into impenetrable dullness… the hideous images rise in your field of vision.
ACTION — for a week now, professor Tchou Wrong reads and rereads the Supreme Public Servant’s latest book. He always worked cold and practiced acupuncture by correspondence. He operated cold, scalpel in his left hand, the little red book in his right one. Obviously his successes were very limited — song week in Peking went on without incident — Paris and London were crushed by greyness, and the Soviet Union not yet hypnotized by Nixon seriously thought of joining the Common Market… here, assassins were working over time.
ACTION — 4 pm, the lounge at the Chelsea Hotel… they entered the lounge completely stoned, armed to the teeth, brandishing the Pink October pickets… they stank of ether, rubbing alcohol, some were tripping, THC and super pot, most of them were high on amphetamines… originally they wanted a Housing Project for themselves on 9th Ave, but they decided to start with the Chelsea Hotel and the YMCA swimming pool… automatic-gun shots between the legs of bathers lying under tanning lamps, grenades thrown into the pool… hundreds of bloody bodies floated in the water, some hung on diving boards… pale green-blue water turning red, purple… bullet-riddled bodies covered with grenade shards lay on the steps leading to the steam-baths, Fag Cruise Row… life-guards were nailed onto the doors of cabins… mirrors were shattered, grenades were thrown into elevator shafts like rosary beads… puddles of blood everywhere… they entered the hotel lobby — pictures painted by masters, bought cheap, were riddled with bullets, telephone operators were killed on their chairs, the manager was hacked to death … the black doormen were chased into the cellars of the hotel by a small group armed with hatchets and electric saws… maids were murdered on the staircase — the doors of rooms were bashed in, dynamited, a rock group that was rehearsing was machine-gunned, the singer bends his knees swallowing his last remolo, the drummer takes burning flames in his eyes, fire licks away his face, another group is armed with flame-throwers… people are killed in their bathtubs, in their showers, sitting on their toilets, some in their beds, others are thrown out of the windows… children are not spared… some try to escape onto the balcony, terraces, emergency stairs, hanging gardens, etc — shots tear through chests, stomachs, backs, tear off heads, marmalades of brains on the walls, guts… An artist falls holding his palette, a guy finishing his best-seller (I was a Hippy before the letter) falls on his nose on his typewriter, burst apart, twisted, smoking… the old couturier and his dogs and his chicks are axed in the hall, the Caucasian poetess opens her big mouth for the last time while her Cuban lover rolls like a gazelle against the wall… white nylon carpets are covered in blood… artists offer money to the killers, models and actresses offer their bodies to the sanguinary hoodlums… then it was the turn of the bar and the restaurant the El Coyote… I rejoiced over the fate of the bar and the restaurant, I liked it… An Italo-American, Number 1 on the Hit Parade was gunned down holding his orange juice… the Spanish waiters had collapsed in the straw and Vagina Souffle… “Ole! Ole!” I screamed…
“You dig, people don’t think, they only repeat what they hear”…
“I didn’t make you say that…”
“Antonio! fucks! Give me the wine chart!”
“Si Senor!”
An incident among so many others — and two steps away, at Madison Square Garden, the mentally handicapped people of the American Communist Party claim that Socialism is on the march — Maurice Chevalier arrives on the Concord which will later, be turned back, a forced landing in Switzerland… Then the swami throws his lighted cigarette into the mouth of the semi-artist who cries: “Good God! I don’t fear anything you old blow-jobber!”… a German face-lifter bursts into tears, he just missed his thirteenth head transplant.

→ 1 CommentTags: Claude Pélieu·Kali Yug Express·Mary Beach

Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 4

August 28th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

A NEON ROSE-WINDOW
DIES ON THE HORIZON

Your brain has been eroded by realities, you took your time, and it was all pretty horrible. Some people blubber, because of their hatreds. Small bites, small cuts… When myths die flowers survive. No more bets. Others weave their multicolored deaths, shake hands, talk and chatter, they have neither enemies nor friends. They say it’s a sign of despair.
Silvery slaps punctuate the course of history with cloudy streams of eternity.
Regrettable incidents, explosions in Belfast… Dublin recalls its ambassador… the codfish war… demonstrators brandish pickets, “IRA = Waffen SS”, “Down with the Irish revolution!” — representatives from African States are molested by drugged skinheads, ether and benzedrine, yells, “Bugger off Brilloheads! Wogs out! Get stuffed Niggers!”… here and there such incidents cause stirs — young people in sport cars in front of Salvation Army canteens mocking the faces of the jobless, the Chinese fiddle about the heavy gates of their commercial missions.
An old paralytic woman in her wheel-chair, waves a banner… “Jesus Christ is against drugs! Stop pornography! God Save The Queen!”… A trip all the way to the end of mediocrity in the streets of the world.
Programmers demonstrate against striking miners. “You see, those assholes are incapable of doing anything else, and then proles are born to work”… “It’s always the same story when people don’t know how to be content with what they have”… A half-wit starts on a Marxist analysis of the audiovisual empire, slowly dossiers and files come to the surface with Ech-Death archives.
Chained onto the street lamps of Lord North Street obese militants start a hunger strike.
The red dykes and the fluorescent queers mix with the blue sounds of television sets that are never weary of dying.
Intox, Intox, INTOX. (A kid is reading a story about drugs in a widely circulated weekly magazine. And then he swallows a little too much codeine, sniffs glue, and gets high on cough syrup. His myths only hold up because of a venomous article, he’ll be poisoned for life. But he might succeed to pierce the greyish screen of time’s tune, sing its songs)… the dead have no stories to tell. God isn’t in the know.
“The time goes by, you can’t see time go by”, a lady, who knows what she’s talking about, told me.
It was yesterday. A long jerky film, lush with hundreds of magnetic tapes… where are the heroes? What has become of them? Are they dead? Are they alive? Stuffed?… it was yesterday… they have grown old, simply. They have become doddery and are now in lab-museums, on campuses, some of them had succeeded in showbiz and politics, others returned to their parents’ bar, or grocery store or garage. The two poles of the future have taken them in charge, they didn’t even have time to wave an eventual white flag.
All the world’s follies are in your eyes. Sometimes it even comes to pass that we are happy and rich. Almost every writer or has made himself understood — signals twinkle in the sky — men and women twist in pain before the cold eyes of the cameras. The kind of pain we show, always, in any place, in short, we don’t think, we pray, we advance, we recoil, we light up inwardly, we try to be happy, free, no nuances, then tragedies happen, we chat, as we drink alcohol, we laugh, we cry, and God calls the police… there are strangers in my house… they came yesterday, they must go to Nepal, they’re here, they occupy everything.
They surface. It was yesterday. A mark on history. Sometimes we happen to understand. Intox. Intox, INTOX. Empire-sounds in the archives of coughs — “time goes round” it speaks — myths die on the greyish screen, les jeux sont faits… they’re here, they occupy… and, of course they evoke brotherhood and good vibrations, they bore you stiff. They take over your personal space. A wave of bouillon and macrobiotic grub slips onto the lawn, a hurricane of greasy papers and used Tampax, the strings of an old guitar squeak and scratch the silence. It was yesterday… two shells of buckshot in the blue sky… I really don’t care.

“Suck me but don’t put it in me!”…a guy in black leather has repeated that for the last six moths, desperately, he tries to resemble Jim Morrison. Will he fall apart, yes or no?… in short, he goes to Switzerland to make his tapes, then events come to pass, a parenthesis of gestures and facts, enigmas, variable distances and lateness between the seen and the heard… The regulars at Bilgray’s Tropico come and go in the sky, shivering in their shrouds.
Ironworks and vacant lots.
The windows of the American Express office are shattered.
Cops on horseback charge the demonstrators.
GIs on furlough distribute tracts. A procession of Scottish communists chant orders (they are on the side of those demanding potato peels.) All that is very original, a fiesta in the streets… “Suck me but don’t put it in!”… a few militants demonstrate, a vague story of washing-machines and community Tampax.
Sun in shining on Hyde Park.
Guitars are plugged into bottles of butane gas.
Processions, Pepsi-Cola, bouillon, hot-dogs.
Perched on wooden crate a priest babbles into a loud-speaker.
Ragged underwear floats over the roofs.
Nuns lift their skirts to piss on the flowers placed at the foot of the war memorial.
A gang-bang of businessmen at the Piccadilly Hotel. In filthy buildings in Notting Hill junkies inject light.
“Suck me but don’t put it in!” — Subway exits puke thousand of commuters — Trafalgar Square is ravaged by vaginal salve, pigeons agonize in the slime. Dense traffic. Pedestrians jostled each other. Pubs and movie houses are open, cabarets and sex-shops too. A huge portrait of Bogart fills the facade of a building. French tourists bray and do their business through their mouths… people come to shop at The Fashion Beads & Jeans, high-heeled Italian boots reimbursed by Social Security, blue jeans made in Belgium… a catatonic Hippie yells, he drank too many Pink Ladies, he’s flipped out, bad vibes… “Where are the photographers!” “Where are the photographers!” — he vanishes swallowed by the flashes from a pinball machine — the moon rises in a sky paved with neon lights.
Japanese tourists harnessed with gadgets and gimmicks go by noiselessly. — The Jap Generation! Banzai Buddhahead!… neon like heavy makeup lights up faces that look like those of wax dolls.
I drank a whole bottle of gin. I feel good. I advance. I don’t touch the ground. I walk towards Saint James= on an empty tin can, I race along, piloting dangerously. I land in a street where there are nothing but Chinese restaurants, the worst in the world except for those in Paris, if I remember correctly… “Get back gooks! Get back dirty midgets! Tora! Tora!”… no one pays attention to me. I crash into a bunch of garbage cans. Three foetuses roll into the gutter. I upset a bunch of crates full of rotten, spongy vegetables. “Suck me but don’t put it in!”, I sing at the top of my voice… a band of skinheads… they’re fixing the preps of a Pakistani with the lid of a tin can, some are waving shards of glass. I spit three times to hex them. I penetrate night’s flesh, going through a jade screen I bump into violence… specters are copulating in hammocks… dead flowers hang from the windows of a private mansion. (Good God! That’s where I was to meet the cultural attaché, I hope there’s an elevator.)

RUSTIC SCENE IN SUSSEX

There are cadavers that jack off, virus-beings that want to relive in your body, they want to train your soul.
Sitting on a case of munitions a Scottish parachutist tries to milk the Holy Virgin. Catholic priest place bombs in movie houses. Riots, atrocities, repression — Protestants cast Catholics into huge ovens, young men attack military convoys, an endless day of violence begins.
Here, people drink, converse and laugh together, others dream. In the streets children are beaten by the police, the wounded are machine-gunned on the ground. A haze of anguish and fear envelops the squared-off town. Inconsolable the children fall asleep… the presence of the killers reassures those who swallow their words, bad magic — I went through all that, shocked, but indifferent — Later on I found myself at Lord Shmuck’s house, there were a few famous names there…
“Please go into the living-room for coffee and liqueurs!”
“With pleasure… may I consult your collection of old manuscripts?”
“Of course, my dear, of course, I’m delighted, make yourself at home…”
An old member of the secret services make a great effect telling abominable stories. (That man is sick, I said to myself) sick, maybe even dangerous… A plump lady wiggles and talks about the Beatniks, Hippies, she’s the wife of a BP man.. Sir Euh-Euh is also there and Lord Whosamajig, a good old sausage with a veiny face, a fat farmer from the region is there too, a bunch of more or less ugly women, all of them very stupid. I wasn’t at all surprise by it all. I’m used to it. In small doses it’s even amusing. And very normal. As a matter of fact I have a lot of fun.
A little drunk and high I profit by it to become very boorish, impertinent. Not a single dwarf will attack me physically.
A historian, through a lackey carrying a note on a silver tray engraved at the Sussex crappers, the note saying that I’m indecent. Governesses and babysitters take the annoying ugly, stupid brats away who were giggling on couches and hissing behind heavy drapes.
“You old sluts! Slaves! Don’t alienate those dear little shits!” I said out loud.
A thirty-five year old Immigration officer was there, with long hair, of course, face ravaged by vestiges of acne. A young blonde girl apparently in love, pierces the little violet pimp where little pearls of pus shine.
Those aphasic calves and huge cows are as ugly and stupid as their servants.
The chauffeurs are all in the kitchens.
And to think that tomorrow at noon we’ll see all those monsters alive.
I swallow two pills of Benzedrine. Personally I’m having a lot of fun. It feels like being in an old 50s film, residues of Greenwich Villages, ex-beatniks… only missing Perry Mason and Flash Gordon, and the token Black. There must be one somewhere. May he’s in the garden, jacking off furiously?… I say: “Where are the Blacks of yesteryear??”…Some youngsters are rolling cigarettes, and passers-by smile indulgently, except for an avant-garde French poet, a guy who knows who isn’t taken in… he’s always afraid that some Hippie in civilian clothes will drop drugs in his lemonade… he’s an ex-lettriste very much in favor… one time, his wife panicked and threw an ounce of hash in the garbage, to protect her dear little ones… One of their guest had mistaken a bar of Pakistani hash for chocolate, his sight was getting bad as of a long time ago. He ate the bar in secret, that fool!… two ounces in one day!… expensive, hard to take!… in short, a half hour later the guy smiles for the first time in forty years, as high as a kite, wanting to hear some real rock, dancing with the broads, and he started to insult his wife and son, who at nineteen knew where his responsibilities were and about the things that are done and not done.
“Well, you see, one must invest carefully, we financiers don’t feel responsible…”
Well, my dead, I’m talking to you and I’m not afraid to say that I’m anti-Semitic!”
A member of Parliament was making a speech about the Common Market.
Satisfied grins from one and the other.
I thought it very amusing, at least more fun than the hip parties where they dedicate books and pamphlets and poetry chapbooks, where all the good vibes are unpacked, and where you have to sit in a circle around the chief guru and listen to the last LP sung by the fool — Oh but, here comes the Swami, the spiritual cop with the grey teeth, Ass Boom Ramdam, the so-called Breath, alias Ali the Puffer, an expert in breathing, bending in half with a coughing fit since he left his Brooklyn cave — scared and frigid beast talked about the Reich… a Maoist crouched in a corner in the shadows starts a hunger strike, a pacifist tries to hid his filthy fly. (I hope nobody will have the idiotic idea of organizing a naked party)… There are a lot of bald guys here. I know some who’ve worked for more than ten years very hard before they could take their clothes off… all these remarkable events are going to weigh heavily on the balance of the revolution… oh! hey! Here comes the courageous publisher who went further than any of the others… blue suit, Rasurel briefs, cashmere socks, he’s pale, his short fingers look like maggots. He still has foie gras under his fingernails. Ah! here comes the slave… a well-dressed old man… I think that, by an accidental cry, we’ll have to announce how temporary their situation is. Tarantulas, rats, shits, hyenas, assholes.
The pond scintillates. The sky is streaked with black bile. Sulphur vapors creeping among the ferns.
A bar. A private club, near Duke Street, Mayfair. Two characters are sipping their gin fizzes.
“To be frank, my dear, I place the Arab on the lowest shelf, the Wog following the dog very closely…”
A vision of Lawrence of Poland, riding a pig, clothed in a filthy white jellaba, entering Warsaw in triumph.
One of the latest tunes puked by the jukebox, “Suck me but don’t put it in!”
Scraps of conversation. I take it all in. A kind of wild madness depicting the collective unconsciousness, I make a mental note, I note quite a few things in bars, night clubs, taxis, toilets, on airplanes, on a boat, in a train, in the streets that are preferable empty.
Sloane Square, two men chat sitting on a bench. I sit down, with an innocent expression, my Sony in my pocket. Shit! Frenchmen!…
“Man, America is it! No fuss over there, I tell ya it’s it! Very nice…”
“Yeah, have you been there?”
“No, but I know, I know I’m right…”
“Yeah, um…yeah…”
Strange guys. Blue jeans and spotted anoraks, boots, dirty sleeping bags filled with half-eaten sandwiches, silly amulets made in Hong Kong imitating Navaho motifs… they=re looking for guys from The Living Theater, and be on their way (sic)… thin hair, straggly, greasy, crooked glasses tainted by grease and obviously a few pimples… They’re perfect! Exactly the kind of guys I adore…

“I’m gonna learn Yoga, man, then I’ll wait until you’re connected to teach you how to play tabla, now I’m gonna show you a mantra I wrote last night, at some guys’ house…” — then they wondered for a moment where they would sleep, or eat, leafing through the London underground guide book… evoking the road to Nepal, San Francisco, Onan City (sic) — “Then we’ll go to see thingamajig, he’ll give us free tips on America”… a rotten transistor… The dean of chimpanzees died this morning stricken by a heart attack… a diabolical substance is motionless over Buckingham Palace, Portabello Road is buried under a tidal wave of grease spots, to be continued is drawn in the sky by a helicopter.
A pub, The George…
“Blacks are lazy, thieves, but, on the whole, rather nice.”
“Sure, but there is no work for the English.”
Those two guys groaned about Europe’s Seven Wounds, pulling on the old strings of the all-knowing man in the street.
“But remember this…”
A telecommunication satellite station is damaged by an explosion.

“That’s enough!”, cried the minister. “What is this? Another revolutionary with no revolution!”
“Yes, Chief. Badly informed, therefore badly thought out.”
“Shut up! Jerk! Vomit your laudanum and get to work.”
“You may be familiar with me Chief.”
“Give this message to the assholes, and fast!”
A ceremony around a mutilated body, larded with stab wounds. His genitals are horribly mutilated… Manson, whose tender passion for Bobby Beausoleil, thought the bride was too beautiful — a fashionable terrorist held forth in front of the gates of a factory, it was Sunday, there was nobody around. He had abandoned everything to militate.
Collective feelings are insinuated into the messages of futurologists.
A cargo-plane crashes on a shanty town of dilapidated caravans and old cars. Snow-covered disaffected building lots.
Political demons advance in tight rows, threatening and grotesque. All is permitted. Huge shortcuts in mondo-vision on the masses of demonstrators worldwide. All this is quite mysterious, partisans, adversaries and allies don’t know what it is all about. Are they even sure they exist? In the halls of Studio Reality the Invisibles smile.
Cops surround a bloc of Housing Projects. Insupportable, brutal scenes.
A yellow fog engulfs the city.
Circumstances are made of dust.
“Let the situation rot, we’ve seen everything else. It’s simple, those people are too far away from the system they want to combat… an irretrievable lateness… as for you, Dickhead, watch out, you can easily be replaced and recycled, ya dig?”
“Yes, Chief”, answers the minister’s assistant, his finest collaborator, as he likes to think… He clicks his heels, kneels down, opens the boss’ fly and gives him a blow job… A global view of Dublin from a jumbo jet, a global view of Shannon, then Kennedy International Airport, New York…Faded photos exploding in the windows of the Gotham Book Market, faded smoke around two thin cats playing in the dusty window of the Phoenix Bookshop… wind sucks the thieving shadows, sharp cries in the oven of the 60s, sexual guerilla warfare in the streets of the world. Nothing has changed. Everything is just a little sadder, a little deader.

WHITE FLOWERS ON THE SCREEN

Young homosexuals castrated by skinheads expelled from their grey suburbs. Pakistanis stabbed in the dark streets around Piccadilly Circus. Apartments set on fire, hippies brutalized. Two ex-paratroopers disembowel a Jamaican, stuffing his belly with garbage taken from the trash cans of a Chinese restaurant. “Here, Brillohead! Here you are stuffed with something worse than your own shit!” Later on they kidnap a young girl who hung out with a Pakistani, and fill her vagina with quick-drying cement.
Televises mud is spreading. John Wayne and Andy Murphy, The Duke manipulates platitudes with humor. Driving the Blue Foetus’ khaki Rolls, he rushes toward the Cote d’Azur. Hamburger Gyp ends his days in a hotel in Seaford.
A green flash in the purple fog… naked, standing on the State Ship, the Prime Minister rushes towards more pleasant climates. Sexual segregation in the streets of the world.
The Pink Panther won’t finish its speech, a sexist flash, red, erasing half its face. “SEXTERA”, I murmured as I took a photo.
Strange sounds invading High Camden Street.
Thousands of jobless people wandered in the streets, waiting for the opening of dismal pubs.
A cinemascopic duel and bossa nova.
“Sir, I, who am not a racist, I do think the crappers should be segregated.”
Soft music in the dimmed back-room. Red Charlotte distributed tracts.
Israeli secret agents placed bombs in a wimpy. Dead drunk Pollacks drink Javel water and bite directly into packages of frozen food. An ad: “Madam, if you have greasy hair, eat some baba mousse” another ad, “Put a little springtime in your sandwiches, buy endives”… “Your son takes drugs, your daughter is a prostitute, come to us for consultations, FAMILY PLANNING JELLY ROOTS”… toothpaste for dogs is sold illegally in Great Britain…
An extraordinary reunion. The general secretary of the Unique Party, a wounded vet and a work hero has the floor. His artificial anus plugged into a bottle of Propane gas. Two young militants stand at his side, armed with bicycle pumps in case of a breakdown or sabotage.
“Comrades, uh where are we with the Tierce? Uh uh, ah ah, the minister hasn’t paid his taxes, hihihi… uh uh… comrades, uh… arrrhhh! But go on and pump you little shits!…uh!… Pump!”
The General secretary collapses. The undersecretary grabs the mike.
“Pump! But go on and pump!”
“Comrades we’re not responsible for the thousands of young druggies who vegetate in psychiatric hospitals, and I say — Yes! We’ve thought of everything, education, cultural revolution, sexual revolution, counterculture, sports and leisure, cold buffets, drinking holes, crappers and pop music…”
“It’s the fault of LSD!” cried a self made union man.
“He’s drunk! Just get that baboon the fuck out of here!”
“But he’s a comrade!”
“Don’t give a fuck!”
“But he’s a work hero!”
Don’t give a fuck! He’s kicked out of the Party’s control! A militant must behave, be an example… there are too many faggots here!”
I was of the same mind, but who am I to criticize? I was there, with an extraordinary mission for the Insect Trust Gazette.
Hideous images were distributed to young adults and to schizophrenics.
“An historic flop”, I said to the Muslim representative to Blacks from North America. He nodded, spreading his little plastic rug he began his prayer. An Eskimo Guevarist representative told me: “There’s no discussing with people like that!”
The cultural industry has always been influenced by military & industrial complexes, which is normal, whether it’s about persona; capitalism or State capitalism, even Socialist, that’s how the techniques of brain washing are abandoned in advanced capitalistic countries, the Control Organism possesses much scarier weapons than that. The imperialism of the stomach and social security have rendered pre-war techniques null and void. We’re entering a golden age. “Eat, drive fast, jack off, organize your leisure, idiocy is in power!” a period some might regret, paranoia of hearts and minds.
“Where are we with the control of information, Watson?”
“I really think that we are in the majority…”
“Ah, good, and are the masses of polling following?”
“Yes, like a single man…”
“Perfect, Watson, perfect, well, Watson, let’s have a little sniff, the State’s blue cocaine… ah, Watson, increase the free distribution of sausages a bit, as well as wine and beer, that’s very important, Watson… we must remain neutral.”

Children are selling ‘Le Cri du People’ in the empty streets.
Drunk with rage and hate the police stomp cadavers.
Veterans, stoned, parade naked, tears of pride sparkling in their filthy eyes.
The nation’s pupils demand the heads of the idle, of sleepwalkers and faggots. Scoundrels exploit public misery, put itching-powder in the stocks of plasma, stop ambulances to set fire to them. Official statistics explode in the cellar of the Sperm Bank.
“Give shit to those who are hungry!” I screamed in a fit of generosity.
Fifty year-old black leather jackets attack isolated passerby with syringes filled with curare.
“Now that’s fine, Watson, good job, the people want information, true TV news”… a CEO agonizes, clobbered by a chimpanzee… confusion reigns in the slums of the city… a group of social students are ambushed… Her Majesty the Queen hitchhikes in Asia.
So, when we think about it, they call us cowards” murmured a cop, on all fours, pants down, buggered by a red-headed, green-eyed sailor. Another one yells with his mouth full of come: “Ugh! Good God! Where are the elite!”… a CIA agent high on heroin absently scratches his balls.
I was lucky to witness the raking of Sacramento by the red drag queens. At that time dwarfs stayed quietly away. Reagan leading the assault units, surrounded the vacant lots in Harlem.
The idol of songs was on stage. A mini-Woodstock failure. He fiddled with his amplifier. We put TNT in his electric guitar. You should have seen the flash when he pressed the button, BANG! BANG!… and his expression!… better than napalm… and his pianist sizzled when he placed his feet on the pedals of his electric organ, SRRR rrrssshhhh!… A smell of burnt flesh and a commercial flash, some of the fans fainted, nothing much was left, his Italian boots and cuff links.
“Bravo! Bravo!” cried the police commissioner, “when I say musicians under police protection I’m not saying in the morgue!
Some Bangladesh partisans struck up the national anthem.
“Those people won’t go far, Watson, with that kind of a song…”
A few scabs beat the wives of strikers. Ixca and Sally were fucking in a beet
field. Suddenly Ixca found himself alone, the cock armed… Sally’s clenched hand was disappearing in the mud… a few bubbles then an awful silence. Stunned, Ixca looked around him, he saw an upset sign where he could still read: “DANGER QUICKSAND”.
The super Yeti and the Swami organize a competition of spiritual grimaces. Their sexual tentacles left imprints in the sand.

Heaven will thank you. You will thank heaven. Everyone is very polite.
The swami made a little greasy, wet sound. God doesn’t need gate-keepers.
Men tell a few untrue stories, that’s the trouble.
Tomorrow, the vision of several million individuals will be upset by the international market of cables and video-cassettes. I won’t insist on mentioning the political side of that revolution.
The cries of militants turn into murmurs. Ectoplasm pushes against them and sodomizes them, then fill all their orifices. Their groans and murmurs prove they like to be humiliated.
After having come for a long time in Red Charlotte’s ass, an ectoplasm forced her to her knees, and plunge her tongue into the heroine’s rectum and swallow his sperm. Little by little they all dovetailed happily, dabbing their anuses with bits of cotton soaked in brilliantine.
“You’ll earn your bread by the sweat of your brow” murmured the hypermarket manager.
“We will force them to make their peace with their work!” cried a student from Teachers’ College who had dropped out to work in a factory and who was not used to sodomy. A young hoodlum glides up behind him and screws him in the ass. The muscles of his stomach harden, with a demented cry the hoodlum fucks his ass. The brilliant militant shudders, and his cock spews, splattering the shelf of fine lingerie. On the assembly line of programmed sodomy there were quite a few candidates. Then all the demonstrators were dominated by sexual rage. The cops distinguished themselves as soon as they lost their inhibitions. The crowd officiated actively. Unfortunately the seriousness of politics and the game took the upper hand, and ideological services repressed, with extreme violence any deviation, going along with the powers that be. To enjoy sex was forbidden. It was quite clear.
Incidents of rare violence went on for several weeks. Every day thousand of beings clinched. The cops sniffed their adversaries like passionate and jealous lovers.
No rapes to report.
Gigantic and impressive fornication. Intense effusions. Pure and exquisite emotions. All their senses were fulfilled. Some were unable to hold back their tears and their ecstatic cries.
Early in the morning violent fights restarted. In the daylight no sexual impulse preoccupied the protagonists.
Juju and Chano slept side by side near a barricade. Chano turned over, groaned, opened an eye… a terrible erection that he tried to forget… Chano put his hand between Juju’s thigh who was still asleep, then he wet his fingers with saliva and wet Juju’s anus, Juju moved a little, groaning he stretched his adorable ass. Chano penetrated him gently, holding onto his shoulders, slowly he moved up and down, he couldn’t stop his movements.
Juju barely moved, contracting his rectal muscle, hoping Chano stayed there, and never relaxed his embrace.
Their bodies covered in sweat shone in the fog of teargas, the odor of come dominated. Chano came in Juju’s ass, which contracted in the ultimate reaction, feeling the long spurts of come flood the bottom of his ass… In their trucks under their blankets, soldiers caress each other furtively, the smell of semen mixes with the odor of gas and tobacco. Some of the officers were troubled by the excesses.

(to be continued…)

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Bacteria, BP & Big Bucks

August 27th, 2010 · Agitprop, Capitalism, Climate Change, Environment, Fossil fuel, Global Warming, Gulf Disaster, Man-made Disaster

Courtesy of Science/AAAS

Well, Cloclo’s Kali Yug will have to wait until tomorrow, despite your baited breath, gentle readers, but the following seems important enough to disrupt the summer Beach Reading tales. Nicole — who is off to New Orleans to take part in fund-raising art & poetry activities meant to help alleviate ever so slightly the plight of the Gulf (click here for details) — sent me a piece of journalism on the fabulous new oil-eating bacteria discovered just in time to make us all relax given its implied suggestion that nature will take care way better and quicker than we ever could, and at no price to BP, of the disaster the latter gang of hoodlums brought down upon us and the waters of the Gulf. Here is the core of the article:

Newly discovered oil-eating microbe ‘flourishing’ in Gulf

By The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 — 2:45 pm

Researchers say previously unknown microbe thriving by eating spilled oil in Gulf of Mexico A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf following the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., reported Tuesday in the online journal Sciencexpress. “Our findings, which provide the first data ever on microbial activity from a deepwater dispersed oil plume, suggest” a great potential for bacteria to help dispose of oil plumes in the deep-sea, Hazen said in a statement. Environmentalists have raised concerns about the giant oil spill and the underwater plume of dispersed oil, particularly its potential effects on sea life. A report just last week described a 22-mile long underwater mist of tiny oil droplets.

“Our findings show that the influx of oil profoundly altered the microbial community by significantly stimulating deep-sea” cold temperature bacteria that are closely related to known petroleum-degrading microbes, Hazen reported.

Their findings are based on more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2. They found that the dominant microbe in the oil plume is a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales.

This microbe thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit).

Hazen suggested that the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

Scientists also had been concerned that oil-eating activity by microbes would consume large amounts of oxygen in the water, creating a “dead zone” dangerous to other life. But the new study found that oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67-percent while within the plume it was 59-percent.

Which sounds excellent, doesn’t it? Maybe too good to be true? Well, let’ see who paid for this research — which may make at least those among us who have little faith in so-called scientific “objectivity” think twice about the god-sent bacteria:

The research was supported by an existing grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois that is funded by a $500 million, 10-year grant from BP. Other support came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Oklahoma Research Foundation.

So maybe it’s true, there is a sudden explosion of oil-eating bacteria. But what was that New Jersey second hand car dealer radio ad for yesteryear: “Money talks, nobody walks?” Or something like that. At this point I certainly wouldn’t trust research concerning the oil spill in the gulf done with BP money unless checked & counter-checked by independent (of big oil and the government, if that is possible) set-ups. For when the bacteria that eats the nasty remains of the dispersents? Or maybe I have been made paranoid (though I’ve always trusted Bill Burroughs’ saying that “a paranoid is a man who knows the facts”) by recent readings — oh, come to think of it, do go and check out the chilling piece of investigative journalism in this week’s issue of The New Yorker (hey, they’re not bad as long it doesn’t concern poetry) by Jane Mayer called Covert Operations and detailing the brothers Koch’s use of their millions for cooking up or backing secretive extreme right wing causes.

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The Gulf Stands Corexit

August 26th, 2010 · Environment, Fossil fuel, Gulf Disaster, Man-made Disaster, Oceans, Unnatural Disaster

Interrupting the Pélieu Beach Novel for a day to bring you some news from developments in the Gulf region. It looks more and more as if the US Government and BP work hand in hand (or at least actively work at not letting one hand know what the other does) in order to cover up the extend of the disaster by making the area look “clean” — or at least cleaner than it is or could be, via continued use of dispersants that are at least as dangerous & destructive as the original oil is. Here is a recent article from Washington’s Blog:

Gulf Chemist: Mercenaries Hired By BP Are Now Applying Toxic Dispersant – at Night and In an Uncontrolled Manner – Which BP Says It No Longer Uses

Bob Naman is an analytical chemist with almost 30 years in the field, based in Mobile, Alabama. When WKRG News 5 gave Naman samples of water from the Gulf of Mexico, Naman found oil contamination, and one of his samples actually exploded during testing due – he believes – to the presence of methane gas or Corexit, the dispersant that BP has been using in the Gulf:

But the story only starts there.
A few days ago, Naman was sent a sample of water from Cotton Bayou, Alabama.
Naman found 13.3 parts per million of the dispersant Corexit in the sample:

WKRG.com

That’s a little perlexing, given that Admiral Thad Allen said on August 9th that dispersants have not been used in the Gulf since mid-July:

We have not used dispersant since the capping stack was put on. I believe that was the 15th of July.

***
But I would tell you, there are no dispersants being used at this time.

More imporantly, Naman told me that he found 2-butoxyethanol in the sample.

BP and Nalco – the manufacturer of Corexit – have said that dispersant containing 2-butoxyethanol is no longer being sprayed in the Gulf. As the New York Times noted in June:

Corexit 9527, used in lesser quantities during the earlier days of the spill response, is designated a chronic and acute health hazard by EPA. The 9527 formula contains 2-butoxyethanol, pinpointed as the cause of lingering health problems experienced by cleanup workers after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and propylene glycol, a commonly used solvent.

Corexit 9500, described by [Nalco's spokesman] as the “sole product” Nalco has manufactured for the Gulf since late April, contains propylene glycol and light petroleum distillates, a type of chemical refined from crude oil.

Moreover, Naman said that he searched for the main ingredient in the less toxic 9500 version – propylene glycol – but there was none present. In other words, Naman found the most toxic ingredient in 9527 and did not find the chemical marker for 9500.

Since BP and Nalco say that no dispersant containing 2-butoxyethanol has been sprayed in the Gulf for many months, that either means:

(1) BP has been lying, and it is still using 2-butoxyethanol. In other words, BP is still Corexit 9527 in the Gulfor(2) The dispersant isn’t breaking down nearly as quickly as hoped, and the more toxic form of Corexit used long ago is still present in the Gulf.

Naman told me he used EPA-approved methods for testing the sample, but that a toxicologist working for BP is questioning everything he is doing, and trying to intimidate Naman by saying that he’s been asked to look into who Naman is working with.

I asked Naman if he could rule out the second possibility: that the 2-butoxyethanol he found was from a months-old applications of the more toxic version of Corexit. I assumed that he would say that, as a chemist, he could not rule out that possibility.

However, Naman told me that he went to Dauphin Island, Alabama, last night. He said that he personally saw huge 250-500 gallon barrels all over the place with labels which said:

Corexit 9527

Naman took the following picture of the label:

(The A version of the dispersant – 9527A – contains 2-butoxyethanol).

Naman further said he saw mercenaries dressed in all black fatigues, using gps coordinates, applying Corexit 9527 at Dauphin Island and at Bayou La Batre, Alabama. The mercenaries were “Blackwater”-type mercenaries, and Naman assumed they must have been hired either by BP or the government.

Naman also told me that Corexit 9527 is being sprayed at night, and that it is being applied in such a haphazard manner that undiluted 9527 is running onto beach sand. For confirmation of many of Naman’s claims, see this, this and this.

Naman sent me the following additional pictures showing Corexit pollution, use and storage (none show the mercenaries dressed in fatigues; apparently, such photos would have been too risky)

[see the photos here.]

WKRG.com

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Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 3

August 25th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Uncategorized

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

HOT LEAD IN THE HEDGE OF STARS

Horizons, arrows, flexible clouds, silent gestures describing the generation that was sitting on the electrified fence, clouds broken by the light breeze, electronic music flattening the wheat, screams poured into the Echo-Death dossier. The primroses and the forget-me-nots have disappeared. Must we tell you that nothing happens just like that, simply? Memories set on fire. Fairyland over Cielo Drive, Highway 1, Route 66, East Side & West Side Highways, New Jersey Turnpike, Spaghetti Junction, and further up SKYLAB, the firmament, and the wind that always chooses silence, like the dead flowers torn from the melodious soil. You can’t survive with someone else’s screams, you can’t survive with the tics and yellow laughter of a generation, you can’t survive with a single ideology or ideas, you can’t survive with a panoply of words, images and sounds.
Back to speed, collage, cut/up, image after image, word for word, sound against sound, a cut/up in the anemic night wrapped in nylon, a poll of false news that fly from mouth to mouth, while silence with a damp cloth wipes away what’s left of the 60s, that’s to say nothing.
Sweet Jane water murmurs and carries comix away, flames follow eyes, and in the wind scattered doodles, in the heart of solitude that advances like an egg in the grey sky — on the back seat of a cloud an angel strums an electric guitar — the wild music germinates around an endless morning.
Horses gallop in alfalfa fields. Blue and green hills hurtle down a silvery trail with white clouds under a black sky. And on the shelf of oblivion Speedway Road, dimly in the rain. The landscape makes its bed in a whirlwind of whispers — under a thin layer of clouds the star studded polygon in the vein tree — solitude smokes in the darkness, lilacs lose themselves. A mint leaf tells me that I’m still alive.

THE
SILENCE
CRACKS
A
DANCER
PLACES
A
KISS
ON
THE
JUKEBOX

Electric Rainbow Hill, 5 am, the purple fog. 5 am, great cold in fire’s deserted
bed. The gold of the rising sun sinks into the pine forest. The frozen pond will be incapable of predicting the future.
The future? Is Today Tomorrow? Ray Johnson wrote this to Ruth Szowie: I
wore my pink wig today? The future? Poetry should be sold like Coca-Cola — the boiling tea steams up the night’s shelter — the purple fog fills my heart. Sinister information, horrible events, light ravages the dying night. Raw winter’s silent spasms, grass flakes on the window panes.
Colors stream, the white cliffs close the march — frost bombards dawn — a parade of trucks shimmer on the highway. Sounds stifled into sandwiches and a few flames straddle the blue spray.
Vitamin C pills address Sweet Williams familiarly. Ann’s here to pick flowers (between two planes) without giving them names.
SKYLAB is saved, the astronauts have returned after 28 days, a spectacular rescue. And during that time the Nixons struggled in the nuclear cramp basin. We chase butterflies, we pick roses, we’re happy in this basket of hair, June’s breezes chew on reality.
Rumors. Vacationed carcasses. Released skeletons. A marmalade of bodies. Allen will be here next week.
Doctor Leary says that the Universe’s perfect, and I think the world’s sordid, to high heaven… we live with or without masks, on the fringe of institutions, and we sometimes speak beside nature, near reality — but, nevertheless we speak a ‘social language’ in the heart of explosions of violence, dominated by our own media, by our own myths, we speak our time, laminated by the most repressive structures. We’re suffocating. It’s ‘this & that’ say some — let’s send them back to back into the old suffocating film — the control machine has become more and more discrete and efficient.
“I’m going to get a tan on your tombs”, murmured James Bond to Dick Tracy and Modesty Blaise, while Tito Vulvo masturbates in the bourgeois columns of The Social Vise.
Our dynamic structures, laden with eternal and alienating values that obsess the sexual proletariat.
Neuron panic.

THE COMPUTER LOST IN THE ELECTRONIC HEART OF AN ENGLISH TIBET

Anguish reinforces the consumer’s vanity which is chemically poisoned.
Evil gadgets, flashes, technological conjuring tricks, etc. Time-eaters come from the School-that-Stinks, and tirelessly repeats the Space Opera, sponsored by a brand of soap. We’re on the fringe of profound debility and we’re in space. We’re committed to nothing, and nothing disengages us. We’re the accelerations of conflict. We get all the messages. We are the MESS-AGE — cattle doze in mud, total spectacle — ‘The Flipped Out In The Middle Of Nowhere’, who will smash our last illusions?
Corny meditations, manipulations, provocations, etc. Robots are using their heads. Flesh cracks. The teeth of our minds are chattering. The rest collapses. It ain’t by chance if the infirm are agitated. It ain’t by chance that there are so many sick violent people. We’re entering the Era of Disappearance. And for those who have atomized their brains there isn’t much left of their cerebral crust not even an Electronic Tibet, all that’s left is a message of flickering pain in the grey film of the daily grind. Memory recall tells us that there is only one life, that there is only one world.
A voice in tears, and beyond the reality of freckles calibrated by Springtime, tell us that the Brain Police has no visions.
A spectacle-landscape in the herbarium is in my heart, the bestiary in my head. Supernatural pink silhouettes and the sounds of water — how to describe the white hot rings that sleep in the river’s bed? — words mustn’t complicate the lives of images.
Robots’ syntax is frozen in heavy metal. Mulberry trees hate thistles. Hills invaded by gorse, by blue-bell lamps, by moon flowers — the thousand wonders of fair weather, voluptuous waves, and the songs sinking into our solitude.
I can’t seem to answer such questions.
A claw against the livid sky. An ageless fog. Someone is going to pull his hair out again. Who wants to have his head on his shoulders? We’re rich in laughter, we should be rich in everything, even dollars.
A collision of all the suns — good and bad news — A secret fire, in my image, the Universe is partying, and there are still people who, with weapons in their hands, etc, etc., — those fluorescent morons haven’t yet understood that life gets its source in the bare lips of space. They’re not the only ones.
The episode Vietnam Parking Lot Blues is over, erased. The snows have melted and wander around alone. Fair weather will persist.
We breath in the center of electric mosaics. The film, will be unpleasant, at times, frightening, unbearable.
Forget-me-not telegrams in the hobo’s pocket, realities stripped by ashes and hazes — pearls flow, drip, explode and mix with butterfly wings — everything lives and relives intently, like the sexy telegrams in the wind’s pocket.

VIA SATELLITE

A star dives into the sky’s fur — who dares to write on my back? — the wrong side of a word? The skin of a sob?
What is there to say? (your applause is taped by death TV, The Big Cosmic Pancake). Yesterday, on the beach, a loud scream, followed by a black flame, announced that night will not submit to neon.
Neon beheading the shadow’s spire — time’s traces die on the screen — THE
SKY’S HOWL.
And just at the corner of night, trees in flames shed their skin, colors breathe,
the moon rips the boisterous silk of a pale sky — we start to drink and smoke, we fall asleep beaming, we awaken sick — ultraviolet in flesh and bones drags neon onto the beach. Rainbows meet just on the corner of night. Shadow and light mosaics.
The landscape makes its bed in the watershed of reality. Music. Savage embraces. Shipwrecks. Clouds are unaware of rumors and clamors, good and bad news, the clouds put to sea. Pine cones explode in the fire, laughter crackles in the chimney.
Day is breaking, turbulent. A world glitters in the cry of a seagull, every subject is rolled by slow waters.
Poetry, worlds and erasures, and on the arm of the sun, in one fell swoop, dawn’s golden mouth.
Instant, reality, comix, Polaroid scenery.

In front of my TVs I open my eyes on what I’ve forgotten since 1970. We’re on the tracks of the Villains of Space. We dream between our walls. We know that there are billions of galaxies in the Universe, and that all the living mechanisms , from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, pass from inanimate to animate. We know that God is the witness to that will. Men created Heaven and Earth.
What are our technical skills?
We are feeble astronomers, and what is left of our good sense remains in suspense, near a planet I used to call NOT TO BE DOUBTED.
Poets are all like their fellow creatures, consumers, dominated by the Brain Police and Sexual Bureaucracy.
Pollution and overpopulation will be stuck in the nuclear cramp basins. For a long time, the password was: NERVOUS DEPRESSION FOREVER. We should be wary of that defect, of disease, of old artistic concepts, of feelings of equality, and properly fix the operation: IT’S ALWAYS SUNDAY.
Polaroid hamburgers over cucumber-cities.
The integral transformation of citizens above suspicion. A pre-selection of ordinary and simple-minded people on the electronic keyboard. The electronic memory of all the televised deaths. Operation FOR MEN WHO ARE MEN — a light touch on social troubles and the psychodramas that ravage the Western paranoid nations — troubles unmaliciously caused by the retarded who haven’t entered the twentieth century emotionally. Operation LET US FINISH OUR DAYS AT EASE.
Equality feelings, the end of prejudice, the abolition of money, fans & pop stars smoke brawn, operation SWEET MAMA — we hold our loved ones dear, don’t we? — We have nerves of steel and the pills that help, our personal objects and instantaneous memories only survive by electronic impulse. Our power (I cannot find another word) doesn’t depend on a minority. Operation SEX DISPLAYED. Under the Florida sky, operation WE’VE GOT CHUTZPAH, and nothing underneath, except for an old sprawling city, unaware of love and hate. A stencil-city saturated with neon, skyscrapers and purple fog. The electronic news on Watermelon Street disappears behind the blond mist that rise from the black streets and along the skyway the headlights of a million cars twinkle. On the side I think that those robots were maybe happy teenagers, high and unthinking. Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter.
KwammMM! KAPOW! Zonk! Ouch! Zzzziing!
Habit? A murmur? A napkin? A finger-bowl? A pink flesh taxi?
Freak & Funky, inky-dinky parlez-vous… In the purple fog of Metropolis, or in the blue fog of Gun Hill, the last electrified minutes explode one after another… it was yesterday (but what does today mean?), nothing, I guess, absolutely nothing — the global village changes at the speed of light — we’re here, we’re elsewhere, we’re there, we’re not there, we keep silent together.
They talk about Nixon’s genetic characteristics, Kissinger-Folamour & Mao’s chromosome anomalies as well as speed freak Hitler’s as well as the Pentagon and the Kremlin monsters who all came into the world with a pair of abnormal chromosomes. (Like the Villains of Space, like loathsome Beings. And there are many of them. I will introduce you to a few.
The Masked Cucumber, the Venusian Banana, Stinking-Cloud, the Ravaged Nippon, Red Charlotte, the Mad Anti-Semite, the Recycled Wog, Zorba the Schmuck, Hamburger Fart, the Catatonic Hippy, Jew Fart, Jose Bravo, Chopstick Charlie, the Masked lobster, Shit-On-A-Stick, the one-legged Negro, Tinker-toy Papa, the Dumb Structuralism, the Venerable Prick, the poxed Truffle, Johnny Guitar, the Talented Aborigine, the Sophisticated Prole, the Spatial Drawer, the Blue Monkey, the Musical Sleeping-Bag, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, Flesh Gordon, Henry Slap, Lady Punk Queen, the SS in Skirts, the Flying Mama, the Committed Waitress, the Introverted Terrorist, the Shitty Galaxy, the Cosmic Hooker, the Asthmatic Panther, Absolute Gratitude or the Courageous Publisher, the Conclusion Card Shark, Modes Et Travelos, and many others who have crossed the border of ugliness and filled your ashtrays.

Operation CASH FOR TRASH.

TIP OFF THE >CREEP=
OR EAT MY LUNCH CAPTAIN AMERICA
SO WHO OWNS DEATH TV?

Richard Nixon’s cronies are not the heroes of the American conscience. Seen from afar or near those incidents must not recur too often. That’s the opinion of the DICK TRACY TV brain trust.
With the erosion of the dollar, the great counter-revolutionary peace and the Watergate affair, soybean flies away. Bad business for the US that assures 90% of it on the worldwide market. Since then the environmental politics have changed, and only the leftist side of the public believes in the good intentions of one or the other.
Watergate? — a tragedy for Richard Mulhouse Nixon — a catastrophe for the Industrial Military complex. Nixonoids and napalmicans debunked by Congress and the Senate. The future for the republicans is erased for several decades. But is that really a tragedy?
Could it be a scenario imagined by the Villains of Space?
Could it be a bit of science (political) fiction?
Could it be a conspiracy at the service of demoniacal forces of the control powers, of sex and blood?
Could it be the terrorist universe that inspired Televised Death?
Watergate? Could it be a puberty-reaction of Margaret Mitchell’s?
Could it be…
:By God! Kill those Commies! Smash these gooks! Knock out the fags! Fuck the goddamn Blacks!”… We’re on the edge of the precipice.
How can we depopulate the planet?
Can we intervene where the real dangers are shown?
Can we take sides?
Nixon and Brezhnev measure the power of flux and reflux.
A new world. A new peace. A risk to run — a great risk if we dance — businessmen plugged into the dwarfs of space no longer have any visiting cards. You will see them in Palm Beach, on the Champs Elysées and Sunset Strip. You can meet them at Joe Banana’s, at Max’s Kansas City, on Madison Avenue and Withoutjoy Street, you may meet them in the corridors of the Pentagon and the Snow Subway, bump into them here and there, talk to them, touch them, and you’ll notice that they will reveal their scornful audacity.

Operation “LISTEN TO EACH OTHER I AM THE STATE”, or “THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO YOUR NEIGHBORS”… meanwhile the SKYLAB guys photograph fields of stars, they are expected back tomorrow, Friday afternoon… I think that all this is logical and admirable.
Don’t hang up if you have no collective importance. If you are merely an individual it’s not good form to be listened to.
Watch out! — the Brain Police has read THE GREY AND INVISIBLE GENERATION — operation “MINIMIZE AND SUBDIVIDE…”The agents and dealers of the CIA have also read the invisible generation by inspector Lee of the Nova Police… spy cameras in the video library of the Universe work well. Doctor Leary was the first victim of the MITCHELL-HALDEMAN-DEAN-McCORD-LIDDY & Co. computer … we’ll find them again in the JUKEBOX-TV special edition that has no economic future… thus Nixon takes an additional dimension.
Secret agents, unemployed spies, psychopaths, policemen and agitators prevent the events from being known.
Electronic cameras create a psychological shock that disconcert the voters, ordinary citizens and feeble militants, those cameras erase the sexy message.
STATION ORANGE doesn’t answer anymore.
Super Kool doesn’t have a particular position to defend. Neither does Doctor Strangelove. Sergeant Pepper has taken the Chinese in charge. Captain American is frightened by the cost of operation “WHITE TRASH”, thought up by the members of CREEP. John Dean has promised to tell all next week.
The growth of police power on our planet won’t be interrupted by a new orientation of the US, USSR and Red China, even less by a revolution… there will be no revolution… thinkers and researchers that manipulate nations and masses are liberal, the sexual proletariat, the middle classes and the silent majorities are totalitarian… a few photos, a flash on the screen, turn the page, come in, leave… in eleven years 1984… a new mythology… Apocalypse… John Wayne is surely one of them. And if we don’t watch out we will (consciously or unconsciously) be obliged to obey their suggestions. Children born that day, “the Watergate Generation”, will soon be victims of accidents on the road, legal overdoses and political attacks.
“Hail to anarchy!” cried Senator Cheap. The effect was slimy.
The new way of seeing and hearing has the floor. Now listen to what the Blockade Planet has to say.

The “TRAUMA” team (dissident faction of “Modes Et Travelos”) has infiltrated the sewers of the White House. Jet of infrasonic sperm in the Washington sky. (Dick Gregory writes to Nixon, congratulating him for not having a single Black man in his German Administration.)The President and Perry Mason are going to examine the bi-lateral problems with lasers.
And no flowers for the shit-eating Chinks, Kissinger… you haven’t understood Henry, is that clear?”
“Jawohl, Herr Nixon! Very clear, chief!”
Henry Tinkerer is a flexible person, intelligent, tricky, alert. It’s undeniable…
“Too bad that Bob Dylan and Golda aren’t in on it”, murmured the Medieval Groupie to Modesty Blaise who was distractedly masturbating a catatonic hippie.
“How can we get Doctor Leary out of that shithole?”
“Uh… you know, uh… the tab will be sizable…”

Operation “FLAMBOYANT DEATH” — Nixon and Brezhnev at Camp David, with a few hundred fags in uniform and thousands of call girls in heat — Operation “Salt Peanuts”… Nixon is learning how to use a samovar, after having licked Mao’s twat with chopsticks, nothing could be easier… Brezhnev is impressed, he distributes false passports to all the Jews he bumps into in Disneyland, and Chopstick Charlie becomes a pollster… Pat Nixon smeared with vaginal salve is transferred from one body to the next regardless of American traditions.
Livid Europe (between the pear and the cheese) pursues the hallucinating operation “LETS FLOAT ALONG TOGETHER”.
Since she has been shut in John Mitchell’s gelatin, Martha Muffburger has become schizophrenic. Who wouldn’t be if we take into account what she has been forced to endure. John, Rat-Prick was his false name when he gave the green light to the CREEP conspirators.

The US assures 90% of the views on the science of blood.
Is it some kind of reaction?
“Kill those lousy Commies!”… they’re known, classified, registered… a new world of businessmen in the halls of scorn.
They will, of course be obliged to die.
NEIGHBORS?
IMPERIAL POLICE… Fiction-Police… supplementary dimension of the Nova Police SUBDIVIDED by electronic cameras.
ORANGE ANSWERS STATION STRANGELOVE.
TRASH frightened people a long time ago.
Totalitarian development.
Will surely be obliged to die, like most of the poor children. We’re on the same page.
“Viva TRAUMA!”… a new way of being in the sky… “and no flowers! Is that clear?”… jack-off tab and fictitious name impressing the hallucinating left winger.
Soy and dollars fly away… the villains of space and the nixonoids haven’t changed… Could it be… Sex and Power?… a great risk in dancing — devilish visiting cards — Televised Death reveals its unimportant audaciousness in the middle of those fields of stars. INSPECTOR UNIVERSE’S GOSPEL… From now on Lee will sort out events and sexy messages.
STATION WHITE is to be defended, that’s obvious. Promises to tell all. New orientation. The prolratprick was in on it?
1984… on our guard.
Road accidents.
White-House overdoses.
Legal attacks.
Chinese smiles between the shoulders.
Planet-Blockade has the floor.

Bilateral jets of sperm have you understood me, “Too bad that Bob and Blaise weren’t at Camp David”… “and Leary?”… SALT PEANUTS… Nix-Mao from one body to the other, livid, swallowing my breakfast with chopsticks. An environmental matter, catastrophe, scenario imagined by the force of death. Mitchell started it all.
The Americans watch. We’re on the edge of perhaps…
Brezhnev, a great risk.
One and the other, grey, invisible. They photograph you as you speak.
“So, what about the future for the grey and invisible generation?”
“Rat-Prick won’t change the face of the world…”
Agitators won’t erase my particular position.
Operation “CREEP”, John Dean interrupts me through my pages, we will parachute him into the W. C. Fields= Museum… in eleven years John Wayne will have expired, a victim of his own slimy effects.
Now, listen to the White House.
We’re going to examine Kissinger’s shit. Henry Tinkerer is a flamboyant groupie, “Fashion And Call Girls”… it was a matter of kidnaping extremist leaders and to sequester the clowns of the Democratic Convention “SUCK MIAMI’S TWAT”. Martha, Pat, John and “The Screaming Faggot” on the world market.
TIP OFF THE CREEP AND DON’T BUG ME, HONEY… Milhouse Nixon in the heart of the tragedy. A terrorist universe where silence is essential.
“Smash those gooks! Kill that dirty Black! Twice! Thrice! He’s the one, by God! And he squeals a lot!”
How to depopulate that slimy zone?
A new peace imagined and programmed by the Pentagon runts. They can be heard plugged into the British asshole, operation “DON’T HANG UP, DON’T SHAKE THE COCONUT TREE!”… could anyone take sides!
CIA brain read the other edition.
Hidden camera for the cops.
Super Kool was tough. The cost of the operation? A revolution… a few photos and you obey their suggestions.
The Senator fine-combs the CREEP members into the sewers of Washington. The Chinks eaters of bosses have disguised themselves into catatonic faggots, nuts up to their ears, chewing on little balls of Vietnamese opium. Chopstick Charlie imprisoned since the beginning by the conspirators who put sneezing powder in Nixon’s samovar.
US soybean-erosion, 90% of the sexual affair on the world market. And in full view the Nixonoids make a forced landing on Archibald Cox’s table.
GOD BLESS AMERICA… even John Wayne who’s in the sewers of heaven.
Big Jake, The Duke, an orange shock on the page.
Is it a mistake?
A political-fiction affair?
Blood here and there, is it Pentagon-audacity?
“LISTEN TO YOUR LUCKY STARS…”
“DON’T ADMIT A THING EVER…”
Televised Death in the special edition of SUPER KOOL.
EAT MY LUNCH, TIP OFF THE BRAIN POLICE, LISTEN TO YOUR NEIGHBORS.
A great risk in running. The computer always retains the sexy message. The global village disappears in the green fog ventilated by New York. Sally Harmony vanishes, carried away by a jet of infrasonic sperm.

(to be continued…)

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Kali Claude Yug Pélieu Express 2

August 24th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

And the others? Where are they? They’re stomping somewhere.
Ten years, fifteen years already… everything happens… filmed echoes, morphine, hot bath, I’m raining, and the invisible stains of our generation explode — westerns and technologic counterpoints — a bathtub, an old hotel in Chinatown, a door open or shut… old sneers… North Beach, City Lights, a new world-consciousness, a painful clash, flipped out zazen… a robot can’t recondition himself and flesh refuses to die in the dream’s pocket.
News from the Global Village… Hippyland doesn’t exist anymore. A dim-witted horde of imitators grasps what was written in heaven… like those guys who have never left the country of cheap red wine and checkered handkerchiefs… planetary hicks, Venusian boobs, and now those crazies shoot kids, think for you, and poison the grass that made eyes pop with wonder — we dive into the most distant universe with hallucinogens, our brain, and everyday we draw a map of it, tripping in time and space, and the Life-Poem blooms, people come and go, and limitless powers of speech are carried off by rock ‘n’ roll, ZAPOKALYPSE!!!
Yoga Cut/up, conscience-brain, prosody and bopology, long trajectories. (And, tell me, does any of these things, neither here nor there, have anything to do with the banal stories of drugs? with crime? With the so-called discoveries of the French Underground?)… Hippyland doesn’t exist anymore… the planet’s going to blow up… Ku Klux Klan Kultur is seizing the Universe… and now the sacrament of acid — prisoners leave their ghettos, the sun’s blond guts are in a state of siege — Hippyland doesn’t exist anymore, Woodstock doesn’t exist either, Yippie’s over, diggers crazies and zippies have left, there’s no one on the road, there are no roads anymore, trees march spitting neon, electrified cloud hold hands — how are they going to learn how to live again? With their hearts, with their heads, under the sun, in the wind, how?… void in a ball, a gold-fringed scream in the blue fog, and shadows strip the days that are now counted for us.
I have assembled these notes & tapes at 23 Poets’ Street, today baptized as Gasoline Alley. The arrows of Sagittarius have created light, and shooting stars beg for beautiful tresses.
Cigarette burns explode in empty places.
We were on the road, with millions of eyes, insane dreams molded and rolled visions — the sky rid of its fangs was proud of its freckles — a voice chewed on angelica that the wind and frost had mistreated.
Arrows smeared with honey and Majoun. Arrows shot by the rain passenger, at #23 Poets’ Street, an orange flower-girl who had a boy’s ass — time has blown up my colors, all sails set — time unsheathed that image, this whispering odor-voice, I ENTERED, I LEFT… the ice’s broken, the mirror’s empty, poets bleed on the white keyboard of words — I is finally ME, I shuffled the cards of conceit, and with my foot I reject those thousands of hackneyed, filthy words lying in the dust of Panama City, in the streets of London with the Tantric wave-lengths of consciousness, moving from one end of the earth to another.
Everything happens, all of a sudden things happen, and Willy Lee’s mad laughter falls back onto the dream machine, it’s written in the sky, old words explode at dawn, howling like wolves, a poem digs out vision — dwarfs limp on the screen, fink-computers think for you — we will never pay the tab that we owe the system. Everywhere robots beat, imprison, torture, kill, mutilate, repress, trafficking bodies and souls, brainwashing people. And millions of zombies chuckle, satisfied, overfed. They chuckle when young people leave the life they never wanted to change. Every day they win a cadaver and are upset if the sick commit the irreparable. Innocent windows inside shooting stars — we descend from water, wind, the sun and Earth, singing along with young light years, we’re alive, we’re breathing, we’ve recovered our health, we’re free, and fairies dance, waves spout videocassettes setting the sky on fire, lets images speak.

’IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN’

Ted Berrigan

Seven o’clock in the morning, silence’s broken, spatial music and the wind wound green wood.
Zigzags, broken stars, grab-bags, the mauve haze on Beachy Head recalls things to me. The Universe’s a box of Danish Camembert — lights and neons vacillate over parking lots, telling us that wasted time keeps its secrets — a flame follows my gaze, an instant has stolen the far north from the chance-echo. Erased imprints, absences mistreated by pain, dawns saturated by rain.
The smell of meat attacks the Universe.
Nothing can explain that cloud in the sky — sequences and meditations — a music that cries laughs and sends the world off to pee. A white pen scintillates in the green grass, the Japanese cherry trees do nothing but blossom, dew flows, bursts, swallows the hills, and illuminates empty places.
The Musical Hyena has wrapped up Nixon’s rock in a pop-bag, the rest’s thrown in the sinks along with congealed spermatozoid. The others, tragically repeat themselves or imitate.
We’ve seen it all, we no longer want to communicate in the center of that encirclement and with the growing stupidity. The thief’s wink isn’t one of them, the packaging-space is merely a scenic trick to restore logic and morality of work. We should give nothing more to beings or things.
The red dykes cried out:
“Stand up Hamlet! You faggot! The tide’s rising!”
Like seagulls we must digest things together.
Screams — “Death! Death!”, “Styles and Drag Queens!”, “Proles of the world, caress each other!” “Bomb yourselves with excrement!” “Don’t fight for the last crumbs!”, “The Chinese invented trousers!” — in short, you dig their sort, good vibrations, good karma, nice style, a brotherly hand shake, a big smile in the way proles do… “anyone who has an orgasm’s on the right,” or “proles’ assholes are always filthy”, you know their sort, ugly, very ugly… then the poor guy makes fun of himself, we invoke the anxiety of the uprooted man, the crisis of civilization, the alienating silent majorities are caught in brawn, and my ass reflects all the colors of the rainbow. Zombies love their antipersonnel death-gadgets… after the psychedelic and electronic genocide… zombies and robots, sad suckers of goiters hanging between their legs, at the hour of socio-cultural braziers.
Sometimes, between two airports, everything’s turned into music, the heavens erupt, the setting of shooting stars on fire as well as sexy messages, thanks to neon. The broadcasting of soft & flabby technologies in the videotheque of the Universe — sex-fiction and horrible convulsions — me, I’m dying of laughter and I’m very healthy, in spite of everything, therefore, I’ve won. I’ve returned with a few flipped out chromosomes.
ACTION — ASSAULT PHASE — we’ve cut our hair, our magnetic reading tables are covered with flowers. Not all stories end well, and people don’t often dance in the streets. We’re not always on the sunny side of the street. While waiting to see Malibu Beach & Hollywood again, we have to wander in space-time. Our audio-tapes are the blue prints for survival for 1984. Operation Capture & Multiply,
Operation Wake Up People! The Dream is Over, operation Ah! The Beautiful Classics!… A Flip-Video under the stars, refrigerated jukeboxes, liquid air, heavy & slow water, and a neon-mirror… The bursting of poetic language and written, spoken, drawn and filmed advertisements… sweet hydrangeas and technology, flake-flowers on the windshield, blueish snow like sperm.
They killed what spun around void.
Avalanche-worlds, soft music, and dried sperm, crucified and an emaciated infinity… foamy stars wafting our sleepless nights, colliding with God, between the seen and the heard.
The tongue doesn’t know what to think. Same with me. Ugliness straddles life. Making fun of oneself in the rain while figuring out the lines of the hand of someone else… Boredom furnishes the Universe’s bunker secrets… Eyes, under ice, eat Swedish matches. A sunbeam fan-pubis containing the whole day… worn out snow, inserted vertigo into these blue landscapes, the wind curls and the flowers of the sea pulverize the poet’s insane speech. The marsh-time-table eats from God’s hand. A panorama was the carnivorous accomplice of time. My nerve’s soul tells you to go to hell!…

CAN I DREAM AWAY THE SKY?

Sometimes rage dozes on a sheet of water. Death oozes out of your eye. A crooked laugh strokes the mirror — and there’s nothing important that’s worth mentioning, at least not now — I am free, therefore neutral, & you?… The road is ash-colored. The world’s full of questions and answers, & after-diner tricks. Don’t apologize. And never explain yourself… Almond green on white silk… I’m high… a spurt of silence — a flash of shade on the hills, and a few flakes of snow — the sky’s on alert. Pollution has disfigured my landscapes, and you, lovely slaves, inhale it on these spaces bloated with stones… a bird perches on a branch, the greenness of the pine-grove fills the emptiness, a child’s clear gaze casts away its parents’ scowls. At the death of myths flowers survive. Small bites in the margins, little cuts… Oh! The great cultural pregnancy! Hey! Here come the photographers!… the cloudy stream of wonderment, DEATH ECHO FILES… a cold, sour wind flattens the wild grasses that have survived. It was yesterday…
Whirlwinds. Myriads of elves and goblins. The earth thinks it’s completely naked. So we must tell all and reject extreme misery… notes and smoke… images skip rope over the void. A perfectly human silence can serve language, but Spring brings back monsters that have barely left childhood. Immaturity is one of the reactions of expression.
Kapok guts, hamburgers mixed by electric hands, furtive gestures, bloody neon rots on the highway… children gathered cuttlefish, water-drop baubles, turbulent mandalas — the miracle’s red core, and still more awareness, where nothing exists — I step aside, you’re floundering… pure joy in the desert, an image of Big Sur, an image of Cherry Valley, hills covered with flowers, and the photographs develop howling.
The pale sun washes the city walls. Wind-battered stones squeak and recover their speech. I blow my own bubbles because one must scream in front of those doors. An old Christmas tree creaks in the shadow. Sleeping trees are no longer asleep — after silence, rain — it was yesterday … in a bottleneck of bumpers the Blue kid dreamed of tomorrow, perhaps… it was a Frisco rag mimeoed by cocaine crystals… since then I’ve had my share of fun. PARANOIA Warehouse is closed, like the Drugstore of the Sky — an enormous slice of blue dripping with grafts and screams, back-things uttered out loud, each silence possesses the world.
A white sound occupies the landscape and the night club of the Universe.
France in the world is like water in gas, the country of no return, TV-Mescaline, visions, planets, dawn bells, smokes, white whiskey, X-ray bullets, rock ‘n’ roll — I met Toscanini and St. Jerome (a very simple musical conversation) — mauve jukeboxes behind the hedge of dirty laundry, white roses caught with impassible, unmatchable rumors. The wind’s got my tongue.
Indifference is the same all over. An immense collective isolation I won’t complain about. Silence and music are busy. Nothing can annihilate my personal space. Water flows over comics, with unreadable poetry, pink pornography, with body and soul. We danced in the center of the mandala, on the toboggan of mad laughter.
So, where are the elements of the announced answer?
I hear Jimi Hendrix he’s a man and a guitar, a rainbow forever — a rainbow-man — Johnny Winter, Janis Joplin in the solar antechamber of Texas… the sun was coming to their mouths… Dead gods and Criminal Industries feed on carrion, fanfares stumble on blood-soaked fields. SATIVA, Heaven’s Candy Store, Sidi Hidi dominates the throng, he contemplates wounded galaxies.
Smoke-filled heads and high seasons mumble, the déjà vu vanishes into thin air, the Universe’s tears are forever linked to laughter’s metal alloys — everything should be in flower, at high volume — pebbles snore and turn towards the light, the coffee is boiling hot, Senior Service, H, the windows are wide open, it’s very cold, a pink sun… DIG IT! DIG IT! DIG IT!, without end… children’s smiles make their way among grey, dirty words like burst tennis balls, real words, fat, stupid & filthy… Children are always dazzled, it’s natural as they are innocent… then, suddenly, they die… cookbooks and newspapers close over them, they swallow a moral pill and land on the banks of adulthood. Like you and me. That’s how we all became idiotic, absolutely! Regularly we watch childhood burn, and no one cares.
Fiction, fiction — the recent literary platitudes and the distribution of wild meat and beef bouillon have proved this for us — FICTION? The Tuberculous Fairy handcuffs our inner eyes, and if I can believe the trace-instants that furnish our lives… now we must go, leave with the Universe’s echoes… barely seen God hangs up, you made a collect call, Buddha is at the end of the line, he shuts up… Moloch Drosera, Kali Yug are listening. And we barely fill the planetary stage with our petty mental garbage.

(to be continued…)

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Kali Yug Express: a promised Beach Novel

August 23rd, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Translation

Looks like we may be running out of summer. Now I may not get to the beach to relax in sand (a pain anyway, gets into books & notebooks, yikes!), but I remember as I watch the rain fall outside that I had promised a serial “roman d’été” or “beach novel” on NOMADICS blog this summer in the tradition of French & German daily and weekly newspapers. Well, here we go: a French author, Claude Pélieu, and his book (a novel it ain’t, but then novels are boring anyway) called KALI YUG EXPRESS, as translated by his life-companion, Mary Beach. And so, even if we’re not on the beach anymore, this is a Beach Book — & had both of them lived, the book may have come out as a “Beach Books, Documents & Texts” which was Mary’s marvelous imprint, way back when. (A French edition came out from Christian Bourgois Editeur in 1973). Enjoy over the next, oh, 5 to 6 days.

KALI YUG EXPRESS

Claude Pélieu

Translated
by

Mary Beach

New Kind of Fascism has emerged in the wake of the so-called acid-revolution. Born of boredom loneliness and intense spiritual hunger, it has captured some of America’s most creative young minds. In a period of extreme personal liberation, it has caused more and more believers to opt for servility, to let their lives — their careers, pleasures, loyalties, even choice of lovers — be controlled by the holy whim of one man.
David Felton. From Mindfuckers, Straight Arrow Books, 1972

FOR CHARLES PLYMELL
IN MEMORIAM LEE CRABTREE

A WESTERN AT THE GATES OF HEAVEN

nature mumbles
the sky is fringed with golden red tonight

Highways bleed dawn-stones. Frost lisps all year long. Bare stones fill time. your star-studded footsteps, & flowers scream “no sooner written no sooner extinguished.” An ink spot tells me that I’m not the toy of hazard.
KALI YUG EXPRESS, COCA NEON CAMERA SUTRA — grief banks are open day and night, laughter-banks too — waves carry bundles of tears away, and the buskers sleep in time’s bed.
“When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”
Good and bad news, via satellite, extraordinary, instantaneous news, sequences written above the landscapes, in smoke, on the deserted Technopolis sidewalks, in the echo chambers and the murmur in front of the reality studio, behind the TV jukeboxes, in the basement of the Videotheque of the Universe — crossing the oceans, the Great Plains, deserts, clambering down the mauve, snowy hills, wandering in arcades of slot-machines, from bar to bar — I see a neon sign, huge, great multicolored letters… “NO GOD NO PEACE… KNOW GOD KNOW PEACE… DAY-GLO FUN PACK”… wandering with the shadows, caught between two languages, wandering from hollow to hollow, escaping maturity, to the poem and prose kitchen, to routines, to the Brain Police, strolling on beaches seeing the old 50′s and 60′s grey film, the wall of lamentations of Hollywoodstock Market again, seeing again the huge hysterical and political circus in free fall… a super flash in the dew… I decided to write this book in any old way for just anyone. And for Charley Plymell and Joël Hubaut. “My days have wandered away,” blue in a wall of tea.
Crossbows, scents, miles of wind hanging onto a sex, jukeboxes and scatterings. Everything’s damp, shining, wet, quivering, and the rain hides behind a curtain of aspen. A grieving seagull pukes a wisp of smoke, orange stomps, like these written words, films broadcast over every landscape, dying on the spongy, gray screen of everyday.
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dublin, London, Penzance, St. Ives, Beachy Head, Electric Rainbow Hill, Muddles Green, Coca Neon And Dreams For Sale. Softly grass-flesh cries out. Silence breaks into the flesh. I ignore academic and social grimaces. A shabby, purplish cloud deflates. Over there a lovely green grass coming from Kenya, cultivated on top of a mountain near a big blue lake — a floating typewriter over there.
Ink-solitude, gestures freed by patience & panic, the silence displaces a few drops of water, colors stolen from angels and children are reborn on a sprig of syringa.
Never slow down. Never. Hang onto light, like God. Then a wave of maple syrup. “Get off my cloud Shitface!” — you dig anecdotes, they say — in that case, my advice is to travel light. In the end all the nudes did go downstairs. Nostalgic ghosts return to the non-visions that dominate them, when unity exists in their deepest souls. They don’t know how to waste time nor to get stoned, they don’t know how to take the time, nor capture the wind. We’re on earth, among the living, in the heart of the Electronic Democracy, in the Kingdom of the Flower-Age, and we know that Eternity is a big whirling thing. We don=t need to the meaning of a word explained to us.

I accost you in a shower of colors.
Those colors belong to the Planet.
We’ll be neither worse nor better off.

It’s by begging that we become writers, of course, ink lies, mikes jostle each other, reality overflows, energy versus logic — mud isn’t against our having fun, demons sponsored that farce greatly — collective loneliness and absence of privacy may have awakened us, technology has given another meaning to life. Mist created man and woman, and those that want to alienate us at any price, they’re not autonomous personalities… as for the rest? The rest weren’t really inspired… the spinning of the Universe is very near to what we call madness, so, why did you lie down among the swine with your history books? Start doing your thing.
A friend committed suicide in Cleveland… one morning waking up, he unhooked a gun and placed the cold, damp phallus in his mouth, then fired the trigger, and the bullet exploded in his mouth like a very powerful youngster… The
Brain Police had already signed his death sentence. A prism-penis of hamburger-death dancing among flowers and trees, flashes modeling on the snarling, stupid mob’s bloodshot eyes… (I heard of his death in Honolulu)… When you abandon cities you see all of reality — silence and music translate your emotions word for word, image against image — our emotions have told us lately and unvariably that the Universe is perfect, unwavering, & if I understand well, the governments of the Earth have really decided to save the Planet.
A twilight-boat capsizes with fairy tales.
A sharp pain breathes in the heart of England. New Morning, American Beauty, and Nashville’s Enamel-gaze, the new sounds of Motor City fed by the wild winds of the Great Lakes — unsuspecting children go by while a dead leaf soars over them — they’re told to hurry off to school, they shrug their shoulders… dolmens & menhir show off their beautiful white teeth, a silvery wave carries a teddy bear away.

COCA NEON

Coca Neon, grass vanishes behind the transistors of innocence.
Cities, mouth-taxis, blue zones, conscience-worlds, vaudeville, festivals, games, warm skies swallowed by lacerations, driftings, vanished throngs, Burger City, smells of pepper and mint, Mona Lisa ambushed in a neon-kaleidoscope toke… Southern Pacific, Jefferson Airplane, the Fugs, The Twentieth Century Train, Cosmic Drag… rebirth of neon, comix, light shows, automatic pilots, pebbles playing on the Heart-Strand, this world, yours, mine, ours — we were in the Valley of the Dead, everything was electrified, even the chirping of crickets — the planet’s huge stammering on a pinball machine covered with blue fruit.
I think the cities are still there, Paris, Panama City, Honolulu, Mexcity, L.A., San Fran, Chicago, New York, London… Gasoline Alley, Magical Street, the Lower East Side, Haight, North Beach, Snow Hill, Muddles Green… Nothing has changed. The cities are still controlled by the Brain Police, cordoned off, dripping with neon… drugstores, videotheques, supermarkets, Polaroid Drag, pollution hole — the automatic pilot makes a tri-colored jump, falls back, exhausted, into the puke of a generation — but of course, he’s a hero, shit!… it was a question of walking, waiting, spinning around, finding a good vein, surviving flat on the ground, back to the wall, gnawed by sickness and cramps, whirling with shadows, with corner-words of black cold and white hunger…That’s what it was, police-cars, banal chumps, raids, identity controls, what happens in any megapolis. We watched the garlands of perforated veins, unreal titles… the old films rotted with the detritus of hunger, thirst, fear… the spoon, the eye-droppers, the shit heating slowly, & grey and red flowers returning from the clouds. You’re either in or out of it — with a vague woman odor on a bench in a dive, very ordinary — with aging flesh, blade against blade. And you wake up in a grey dawn sick, you’re always given a bad role. Junkies always tell the same story. There’s nothing to understand, except what’s told on movie posters… you pull out the nine of hearts from your sleeve, snow three of a kind! And blood beats in your temples… short-legged delirium, lisping identities toppling in the great belly-waters… sadness, Heart Break Passage, pop eyes, drifting away — black streets, nocturnal almonds, boiling lead dripping on congealed idling periods.
Nerves hesitate, plastered on the sex-gills, in the death-pit of oblivion. Un-translatable silences. We on the right road, in blurs, inside, outside, and we live with our mouths closed at the end of the most beautiful night, a no-story wading outside of veins — a cabin in the sky — delta-lips dance on the wings of a missile, drunken gestures, semaphores of bone, aluminum and polyester trails… shrill whistles, flames, burned reeds, alfalfa fields set on fire, unkempt clouds all the way to your thighs, and the red mud of thousands of guys holding radars by hand.
Something turned white, swayed, flowed to the horizon, night, Obscure Vale, sorting out of stars, and at 13000 meters, in my sky, Navigator Flower… and sweet almond oil or carnation, protecting the grass in a dream’s backseat… blazing screens, subtitle sounds, Immedia Video, rainy credits… and the slowness, among daylight’s crockery, and the flesh that discovers itself automatically — so, how can you imagine anything? Intermission — that something that cracks like neon on Eternity’s velvet index, attacking bare lips. Dead water. Rutting punches. Games of solitaire.
Expressways, penis gas-pumps, all in bloom… the massacre of chromosomes, so we had to make a break, inside, that is elsewhere, close-up, obeying the call of nerves — and to write all that in bulk, and to talk — writing it on water, sand and wind, on branches… giant billboards… 1963, November, the awful news, JFK is assassinated in Dallas — American troupes settle in Southeast Asia… technicians the CIA and KGB’s dogs, napalmicans, Air Opium Pentagon, and then LBJ-HHH… fluid time tattooed with swells, leaks, the mad hitchhiking from North Beach to Monterey, Bodega Bay to Big Sur — a new consciousness was affirming itself, cracking the jukebox, like snapping teeth in grass wounded by frost. Arizona, New Mexico, sand mandalas take off, brown Mexican wisps agonize in the corn & black wheat fields, stones, turquoise curtains, wind choppers, and Indian flowers emptied of their sap. Mouth to mouth reanimated memory. Long flexible cocks making their way through blurs, in truth, the fiction-flux of something, and all the sounds of the world are more in tune, wider, more humane in spite of everything… like images opened with a knife in the Sierra, or in the flesh stores of Spanish Harlem… ultramarine blue tearing at the Ocean Planet. And signs in the cutlery that night had nothing more to murmur. Empty shippers on the other side of the rink, flashes, communiques, & from dawn to dusk swaying, with hands on hips.
Slowness. Ephemeral grimaces. We can only breathe in reality. And I wrote to William almost every day: Agony to breathe here. Signed: The Frisco Kid… then silence was transferred outside the ropes, the boxer was knotted up by a curt snapping of fingers, and on a stormy night’s smooth brow a very soft word burst, that word could sleep at last, like a ping-pong ball… Realities? Those smiles so forced because of dreaming, living… the angel gets up, plays the electric organ, night overflows.
Frisco in the gangways of the eye. The crumbs of an old western. The one we were writing in Frisco, Tangier, New York, London, Mannheim — electronic fairies had something to do with it, and the Enchanters will come again, in a month, a year, with their bouquets of eyes and fuck yous, with Panama Rose, Rose Nebraska, Tim Leary the Cosmic Whore, Xerox Punk, Kali Yug, Captain America and Snoopy… I saw that day tattooed on a child’s teeth — imagination’s sparkling crime in the Pranksters’ eyes, and the dead, as sad and grateful as gloves. There was no one in the Snow Subway.
Smiles, grimaces. With a spray can I wrote on the wall: THE SUN WILL SHINE WITHOUT YOU. And it was true. And it’s still true. Then a cross on your sucker-eyes, a cross on the junkie, a cross on everything — daylight never ends, people mature on white metal, & the silence they impose on themselves isn’t worth much — mechanics refuse to obey, electric fingers masturbate children who shit on the heads of their elders, they write on living rags, kill, loot, set fires, and the Chorus Girls are in the know… teargas fumes swallow mirrors and walls.
At that time, Allen, Peter & Gary were in India, Japan, Kerouac had left for Florida, Orlando or St. Petersburg, checking his satori-aim after having written Big Sur.
I drove day and night in blue silk. Dylan spiked light in Wichita, Kansas, cities were hungry and cold, the earth was warm as a child’s spit. Sexual shards boiled by Lucy Mirror, dog-eye touching-mouth pebble, morphine within reach… the Angel takes off from Chinatown which was star-studded at the time… creased heavens, panes sticky with sperm, milk-revolver, emeralds stumble, blue grass blazes — the electronic music of Democracy, Virginia creeper drowned in Coca-Cola, a pink tornado, session Hard Rock, Dixie flutes, tubercular TV — strange to think of all that now, see how things have changed, people, the world, life… Nova Kim was with us, and Boo-Boo, wandering in British afternoons, with the latest junkies, sniffing fluid and silent anecdotes… and Sharky, with or without a mustache, was hiding in the grey voices of cops.
An empty suitcase abandoned in a hotel on Magical Street.
A melon colored moon explodes.
Desperate last words in a sticky dawn, CIA smells, odors of China in Cut City — primrose was my name, a tornado cut in naked eyes — Image Base, Nebraska-fugue, and Blue Jack Ink arranged eyes in time, with the Sepia Kid dying in Oaxaca like a simple sound.

(to be continued….)

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Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.

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September 2nd, 2010 · Obituaries, Poetry, Poets

George Hitchcock, 1914-2010

September 1st, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

August 31st, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu at 10 Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

August 30th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Mary Beach & Claude Pélieu Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

August 28th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

August 27th, 2010 · Agitprop, Capitalism, Climate Change, Environment, Fossil fuel, Global Warming, Gulf Disaster, Man-made Disaster

Newly discovered oil-eating microbe ‘flourishing’ in Gulf

August 26th, 2010 · Environment, Fossil fuel, Gulf Disaster, Man-made Disaster, Oceans, Unnatural Disaster

August 25th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Uncategorized

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

HOT LEAD IN THE HEDGE OF STARS

THE COMPUTER LOST IN THE ELECTRONIC HEART OF AN ENGLISH TIBET

VIA SATELLITE

August 24th, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Summer Reading, Translation

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

’IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN’

CAN I DREAM AWAY THE SKY?

August 23rd, 2010 · Poetry, Prose, Translation

KALI YUG EXPRESS

Claude Pélieu

Mary Beach

A WESTERN AT THE GATES OF HEAVEN

COCA NEON

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