(Miles, do you remember? You were just about 6 weeks old when you heard your first Sonny Rollins concert!)

Claude Pélieu : KALI YUG EXPRESS

Translated by Mary Beach

(continued…)

COCA NEON CAMERA SUTRA
FUCK TO THE BONE!

Some time ago I lent a few slogans to the wind, just for laughs. A Yippie fantasy. We were on the West Coast, in our cabins, speeding on the highways in our Buick, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Pontiac, VW, Cadillac, spending our nights in sailor and truck drivers’ dives, in transvestite bars and psychedelic nightclubs. Some of the men had longhair. Others had short haircuts. Grass was illegal but LSD wasn’t forbidden by the rigors of Law — and now that the rain has washed everything, I’m sitting on that fence, I watch the hills shiver — the wind is sitting down playing jacks… anything alive shudders with pleasure, like sleeping woods… the bubbles of hunger have risked all, and the sky weeps in a hollow. The shadow rises, bleeds a halo. Memory resembles a long flabby lip.
We bump into no-love on all the roads of the world.
Poets have joined together in the center of the mosaic-mandala, electronic and democratic. Old pinball machines are lost in the sky, with the clouds, brand new jukeboxes, and millions of children have died of rage… cats continue to play, birds take their veils off, flying hearts don’t see the trees weep… and writers write, militants militate, video-spheres bleed, newspapers and reviews pile up… I don’t do anything special, I’m about to leave again, America, Canada, Tangier, Cape Town, I don’t know where… so, I’m leaving burns in a shower of sparks — it’s possible to think that all is well, write poems, have “lovely thoughts”, live away from it all, to get really high, talk for the sake of talking, about this or that, in the air… in fact, it’s true, all is well — all’s well for me, that’s important, all’s well for the cats, birds, squirrels, frogs, for sparks, a wood fire never babbles, and cannabis-time flows on the brims of cocks, asses and cunts.
Phony wars, catastrophes, dramas and a thousand miseries, night’s bowl is overflowing, meat comes under the knife, silence — a large block of sun hides behind the TV, all the clocks are ventriloquists, and on the volcano of words catherine wheels swallow rainbow colors. Time capsules are bleeding.
(Strong smell of nothing comes from France. Strange, you’d have to leave by leaps and bounds, variable intervals, further away, but towards what?)… faded smoke… it rises, it relates, and the second soul comes to mind, the zombie is erased, and, of course he returns from time to time, but no longer has any power —  slips into the field of vision, the doors of perception revolve, a blue reflection, a flame, a dance, the ball of figure-shapes and souls. They articulate. Enter. Leave. Here-inside and there-outside. And God put the brakes on… (not so sure, I’m positive of nothing, I’ve got my eyes open, that’s all)… in any case the experience was beneficial. We are now 1973, it’s all over. People have gone away to die very far away, as tourists.
A living world is always dangerous, iniquitous, and no matter where we go we can’t escape violence. That’s how you travel, that’s how you find the sun again, stones, the sky, water, wind, stars, the desert, plants and animals, and that’s how we start to live again, and the soul rejoices. This world belongs to us, it is ours… like the pioneers of the Wild West you’ll just have to recognize each other, contradict each other and communicate, forget certain things, to commit follies by forgetting each other, to dive into the heart of the world and die there… tragedy doesn’t exist here, but back in the cucumber-world of Social Security… For God’s sake! They even regret that fire exists!… obsessions, miseries, hysteria, we make so much of those things, and no-color shudders with pleasure.
Gelatine, cramps, nausea, the raw being advances in blue dew. Wrinkles on top of the hill. The wind reinvents itself all the time, and we can only express ourselves with words, or with something like that. Everything is inscribed in an air of universal imbecility… Poets must be heard now… unknown voices must be followed, like you follow a herd of wild horses in the Great Plains. You must live. Everything must live. Now. Forever.
What are they doing? And those? and him? and her?…No one knows, just a guess, we pass by, and that’s right. All our cells emit, high frequency never varies — from the last telex we learn horrible things — the musicians move, shine, slip, electronic targets, blue and gold unfurl, neon dances, the lightshow is within you… music for eyes up there on the mountain… The evening shadow sets fire to a corpse-laden field… The gongs of violence are now quiet  — Let’s not talk about that ever again, boredom wins — we have to move — a drop of dew falls… a tiny sound all in flesh.

A POLAROID RAINBOW

May it all start over…
The ruins of an adventurous education of a young man should be prospected. The crazy, vampire youth, so fragile… A fixed idea shining under Sally Harmony’s scalpel, alias Sally Ka-Ka, a fixed idea that devours an old photo inside my “scrapbook”… it’s not necessary to invent words to speak about hell. It’s clear that those odors escape from crumbling flesh.
The gongs of violence cancel that clog and demolish this galaxy.
Doodling-film of a suffering-language, a poet’s ideas polluting the archipelago  of silence, stale words rotting in empty streets with phantoms and specters with ridiculous, atrocious, unbearable scenes.
Planets stirred by totalitarian sounds. Explosions… banks and hospitals, factories and barracks, universities, penitentiaries, cities and suburbs in ruins.. A pink moon vacillates and bombards us with sparks. Slobbering throngs escaping from blond suburbs set on fire by stoned thugs, feed on garbage, carrying out strange rites in vacant fields and parking lots. Human sacrifices, ritual killings, black magic, what do I know?… hallucinating, tele-manipulated cannibals… nightmares ripped from an old film, words torn from robots and technicians overcome by events.
Riot-tattoos, grins, raids, attacks, kidnappings, festivals, police operations, waves of arrests, bloody demonstrations… neon has made a date in your dreams… shards, ruins, atomized panorama, ossuaries, sounds imitating the odors of rainbows and sprays… TV-shards in metallic jungles vomit the bubble-visions of the hanged, strange fruit swinging on the girders of a pylon… a powdery night enveloping mercenaries with chromosomes damaged by the drugs that were distributed to them by the Law and Order computer. The war is over, what does that mean? The clicks of Polaroid cameras in the back-stages of the world. The north wind carries away thousands of objects. Death’s laughter is full of smoke. The pest threatens the ghettoes, old hags from the Third World drown in the color film projected by the Red Dykes.
Ecce Homo… tragic and burlesque the man kneaded in tears and laughter, blood and shit, that’s the way it goes… it’s only in suffering that man perceives reality… reality? Did he invent it because of suffering?… well, they pissed me off enough, men with their arts, with their snide actions, here are some of them in the extraordinary cut/ups, short and tall, fat and thin, crouching in horrible sobs, groaning with joy and pleasure, gobbling like pigs, weeping like whales, polishing their phony prophecies. The women weep also, sneaking away from hiccup to orgasm, they are, of course, obliged to dominate us to save us from any worry… anyway, for the moment, men are the ones who make me mad and who piss me off.
“Damn bastards!”, that’s about all I have to say… those shits fuck my head.
May it all start over, bird brains!…a young man devouring the prospectuses of this galaxy-film. Empty streets wounded by shards of neon. Ghetto-colors feed your dreams.
A clear fixed idea, emerges from the smell of violence.
Stoned hippies in the jungles of the Third World.
“Are you plugged in, fat boor? Well, then serve it up hot, Xerox is in the backstage”… you, and your dreams! Shit!… a porn panorama jostling the illegible given language… Neon scalpel devouring Sally Harmony’s sex… every message springs from between the thighs of the demonstrators… archipelagos of orders rendered stale by reality… sounds of pasteurized planets… everything explodes!… Surreal crowds buzz in vacant lots, stunned in front of the old film engulfed in a flow of garbage, pale tattoos in the eyes of the image-police… the war is over… noises, smoke, cries, cities puke severed fingers and old dentures, nationalist clicks and excrement-smoke clamps, and the wind carries it all away, red plague, the yellow peril and black tide.
“By dint of communicating the guy became an instrument of psychedelic fascism. Kick the flutes of Krishna out, immediately!”
Who is talking like that?
An old photo was nothing but a word, — a loss of memory — gongs and transistors mix their lights of falling darkness. Galaxy-scrawls don’t answer anymore… empty streets invaded by crazy Blacks… a Street of total Renunciation… strange rites, unmentionable murders… With its complete mass neon ejaculates odor-shards of sexual hunger, vaporizing anxiety on crowd imprisoned in their bubbles. Polaroid Chromosomes don’t answer either. Howling hags invade the ghettos.
Bubble-stars announce the end of the world. Neon screams in the empty streets. Sand is buried under your feet. Broken images disappear. The sun spatters us. The wind unsticks the horizon’s skin.
Night is torn apart — when you’re nowhere reality isn’t an empty room —  outside branches shuffle the cards, the screams of pollution scorn silence, the last diamonds of conscience decompose under a broken geyser… and this line is the story of THAT death… prisms, rumors, seasons play chess, the elements weave the world’s songs… we came from heaven (we weren’t all born in paradise) — the great North reorganizes light, and on the Seven seas intrepid travelers dance — The story of that death won’t abolish the death of others. Life is now merely an illustration, with words on the side of the shade, and in bright sunlight volumes of nature become visible… huge green prairies calm the intense rage of images… one sign, and you’re in all of reality, far from the dangerous semantic traps… that’s the way it goes, a “trip”. A flower that opens, a blue flame, and it’s all over. What the shadow leaves behind blurs our trajectories.
A smile, a grimace beheads the clouds.
Two blackbirds go through a curtain of rain and vanish among the red pines.
Realities full of charms. The wrinkle-lipped mornings that we have experienced in the merest detail. Daylight. The gears of the daily grind weep in front of the unclimbable walls of thorns and nettles. The wind strips time’s tune.
An event, a violet spot was dyed blond — flowers’ prisms howling to break eardrums with the trees only to say they have no secrets — solitude buzzes… a Western at the gates of heaven.
Emeralds and wild bushes asleep on the granite.
Here’s a syringe full of tears, and there, grass shivers.
Chance sinks straight down. Dew lands on our lips like the sound of a bonfire. Chance lisps, it’s ass between two chairs… as soon as chance stops lisping, grass turns green… the universe is partying, and the dogs run with the wolves in their eyes… blue icicles on the Heart Reef… London beheads silver echoes, and the city, anchored in eternity, begs for a little sand from metronomes and murmurs. Noise is noise. Dawn coughs between the walls of silence. Fire spits on Big Ben’s huge balls… gently night folds over the highway.
London in a dawn-cartridge, in the broken void, leading the wind — this morning the planet/garden was all red, continent-scheme where the wisdom teeth of a generation rot in slow motion — silently frost empties the pond. Pink eucalyptus trees are dying. An immense lack of communication fills the planet, silence unmakes the river bed.

Silence and famine riding a cloud. Landscapes full of tears. Fury and blood from one end of the world to the other. Excrement-language around wrecked men. Toboggan-vision, rot. Animals having no country, a society with neither males nor females. (We can do without anything, from the first page to the last — my goal isn’t to judge the propositions of one and the other, nor on what to drink or eat, nor on the 46 chromosomes of urban guerilla warfare, nor…) — embryos wiggling in the pale winter sun — stars, comets and satellites beyond the broken lines of the horizon, genetic information for all… casually, a computer explodes in the suburbs of Technopolis…
An indifferent face, grey and ageless, having the normal number of chromosomes, a face begins spontaneous division, cut/up which sells life and death to X and Y and Z chromosomes… heterosexual face, girl and boy scale, a contrary face doesn’t have the right to enter, girl-face doesn’t have the right to leave… a redemptive face receives grass as a sacrament… a wave of mud to bless the lineage on its way, muddles by the numerous mutations.
Saving genetic combinations. Don’t play the apprentice sorcerer too often… Crazy Blacks dandified come out of the walls with the cockroaches — extremely putrid odors escape from the ghettoes, footballs and starving rats are released —  Blacks chewing cigarette stubs wait for dark nights with crapper-Chinks, neurotic Poles and recycled chimpanzees… crazy Blacks will blow up more than one stetson  when we will have finished shooting the last ecological Western.
Ecoshit, of money and arms… and Mr. Soul straddling the President, big prick Blacks that we displace with their empty eyes on the Jewish screen in the Bronx… TNT brays for the poor Blacks with napalm and gelatine, the usual procedure of the meat industry, raising decibels, and over there, a bit of grey cloth dripping with grease over Spanish Harlem — we’re there, with our whole words and our cut words, we’re there and we eat our own shit, we’re the emulsion of shit-words.
A camera visa for another time.
Who do you think you are?
Some catatonic hippies demonstrate… a voice: “Your sleeping bags stink! Your hair stinks! And your feet! Your asses! Your cocks! You all stink, bidet scrapings! Crypt-jerks! Pinkos! … You’re entering the Fork-Era, you’re on the Manson-Nixon Pox line, you’re the Digestive Carnival”… screams, jostling… I was the Bilgray’s Tropico ventriloquist, mind-vision, bones and soul, but the old hippies still want to chose their words. Summer will be hot for the losers.
I am the pulpy scenery. I am a pin up and the slamming door. I am you. I am myself. I am that English village sobbing over Miami Beach. I am sitting in the bar, near the nightclub, close to the golf links in Carmel Highlands. I am Malibu Beach. I am Key Largo, Key West. I am that street riot. I am those carbonated tears. I am that showbiz embryo. I am that TV screen and that Comix. I am the record of your own life. Watch out, tadpoles! The Brain Police is everywhere, recruiting its agents in industrial jungles, the underworld, middle class and sexual proletariat. I think that the time has come to cut your hair and to change your uniforms. Horrible, provocative things babble in the dead cities. Filthy colors sparkle through the psychedelic penal-years. There are no more poets. They’re all dead. They continue to speak on the scratched record of happiness merchants… broken lights cruise behind the shacks where hamburgers are sold… masses of obscene noises on the ideological merry-go-round… you’re forewarned, you absurd idiotic jerks… bloody kapok spatter morgue sounds.
You’re forewarned, don’t grease the paw of a one-armed man, because I’m here and I can do without the first page. Embryo-comet breaking down the face of XY of the crazy Black… Landless animals wiggling with embryos in food and drink beyond the pale… Info possesses you, spontaneous division forces you to come and go… cigarette stub chewing Blacks vanish in the Soul Western — Braille TV has produced an excellent afternoon — We devour the sky, and decibels provoke the dead cities using our camera visas at the very first page… cut/up chromosomes and colors cruise in the pale winter sun.
I sell life and death, girls and boys. I am the cosmic dealer. Along the road you’ll find your own skulls devoured by apprentice rats and the crazy Blacks will eat your white livers… Blacks that explode before the end of the shooting of the film… empty arms and eyes, grey industries, guerilla-words… Do you hear? Can you hear them?… ventriloquists’ souls plugged into digestive devices of operetta Chinks.
I’m hot pressure-decor. I’m carbonized sobs. I’m that seedy nightclub, Bork Tropico. I am the right to enter and leave. I am that wall. I’m full darkness and dawn. We’re all here. Everyone and everything/ With our shitty visions and the way we compose words. Rotten sleeping bags above Miami. A Swami-morgue bulls hitting in the subway. I’m that street riot, cutting your own lives and jamming your brain waves.
Nixon and Manson are profiled on that wall. Pink flash imitates their movements.
Neutral words twinkling in the streets of London.
Cut/up scream over Key West.
I am the automatic gate.
Famine-silence at the end of night, a spectral pinball machine swallowing the tears of a generation of stutterers — night falls, flop!!… a little white magic to calm sexual hunger of the working class… crazy Blacks jack off furiously in the back stage of the Crazy Horse Saloon… sexual mosaic ads — where are we? as the pages go we become stale. The visible mutation of the message delivered by the grimace merchant.
Planet Earth doesn’t answer anymore… silence cracks… voices burst behind the clouds.
A sign of life carried away by a voice in tears.
We’re finally leaving dreams and the infinity of cheap junk — we’re always with the times, we’re not in space — we’re here, beaten down by political fiction, and the flowers smile as soon as night loses its footing, then they go away, from void to void, with bent heads.

THE ASTRONAUTS HAVE RETURNED

The astronauts have returned. Psychedelic babies have reached maturity.
The Soviet cosmonauts said:
“We were expecting you. And we were waiting to see what the others had already seen before us. Of course, we’ve read a lot, and, naturally we imagined something, uh, um, well, it turned out differently…”
Outside the space ship the cosmos looks like an abyss, a bottomless well. The earth looks flat, and it was only by looking at the horizon that we could see its spherical shape.
Black cosmic night. Raw stars. Sun — a red disc embedded deep in the blue-black velvet of eternity — remarkable acoustics.
The cosmonaut remaining in the cabin can hear the sound of boots and  hands of the one walking in space against the sides of the spaceship.
From the Earth you can’t imagine anything like it.
Under this black surface they expected to see something rigid in stones, outside the ship, listening to all the worlds. Music with nothing and by no one. And the Earth lost in blueness.
Sounds, flashes, eco-horizons’ bony holiday air, and cosmic stars on a raw gold background.
Seen from the cosmos a twilight eye of black velvet. Fascination. Hallucination. Without false simulation, you can’t imagine anything comparable, and on the radar screen I stared at the order coming from below: RIGHT HERE, WRITE NOW… all worlds are audible… Orange caressed the blue coast, abandoned on the seat of dreams… no real danger, only the exaggerated curve of the eco-horizon.
A camera stabbed by an earthling.
White’s glove slaps the red disc.
Cosmic insolation for the Soviets.
Sky music, air waves, shadow-graphs, murmurs sown by the angels of earth. Landscapes, traces, spots, sounds, and void welded to human movements.
We enter. We leave. We’re inside. We’re outside.
Electric Rainbow, Space Agency Bulletin.
I oscillate inside someone else’s words. Lost, reckless, in a bowl of screams. A little pre-raphaelic fear. A Russo-American cut, and several years between three experiences.
An after-glow pierces dawn. A current of water slow and heavy. Thick, mossy,  stringy, gummy things… a counter-sky belonging to that old Western, American colors… San Francisco… scars burned alive by a laser beam.
Our baggage of wings was light, and I was told the sun shines in Mexico City… I know that the world continues to be wrong, and that the dead ventriloquist hands claim that Nature looks poorly. What’s left of Nature today?
Nerves hesitate. Hearts don’t beat anymore. Ink sticks in your throat. Neon-scissors drown.
A tear in what’s left of blood — huge sobs tinkling like cherries, as if to say adios, as if to tell you adieu with its eyes in Indian summer milk — as if to say that the belly-furrows ought to be named after flowers and fruits.
I regroup the pages of this journal that stirs ten light-years.
A second-nature coma, and ashes squeak between my teeth… reality breaks into dream-folds… so, just think of the huge insignificance of a book… Fuck it all, trash-memories, nervous breakdowns… the eye’s locket bursts!… you find yourself high as a kite, and you don’t know why… you don’t know why you’re healed, you came a long way, that’s all. At times we feel that we’re terrible assassins.
The cold crowd lacerates the sky behind the real world. And me, breathing here at 13,000 meters up with that fruit swollen with milk, born in the heart of a star… absent-mindedly junkies are spewed back by time’s test-tubes… a shadow equinox… “with that mummy submitted  totally to the image,”, Shiva, Kali Ma, Jesus Superstar, etc… full mouths stick up a sign… there’s time to tiptoe out.
Tea blooms in springtime battles… like drugs… that’s the way pot vanishes, and the black lysergic revelation… old brain-transfers you’re forewarned — tear-covers and faded bellflowers, dawn, dawn-recipient — the tears of a generation evacuate the cool child… they all wept, even the astronauts wept… everything evaporates, even the conscience/world in the image-sound jungle…  postal dust, synchronized visions, and a fire-tattooed Atlantic mixes its voice with the sands of the Gobi desert, silence escapes, survival lines are visible.
The cameras scan the cosmic void.
Our ocean-planet is blue. We’re tuned into the worlds. Stars on a black background, antennae erected at twilight.
The shadow defrocks proverbs and scream bindings.
Defunct April stabs the rain.
Black and Jewish skins on display.
American colors. November, Kennedy is assassinated. Owsley makes LSD for humanities greatest good. Right here, write now. Snoopy flipped out, the lotus-eater doesn’t answer anymore…
(Paris-Match, June 30th 1973, “Skylab: 28 days in the beyond”, an Article by Raymond Cartier. THE ASTRONAUTS HAVE RETURNED.)
At the speed of light this is my version that is torn in flight. We were really forced to act that way, six hundred Japanese hoped so… international salt-shakers in the cabin of the burst satellite… American nerves wakening the base-sounds, adventurers gravitating around fields of stars. The three photo-men seemed to be asleep. Toilets and word lists, the destinies of electronic champions, camera-shears from Missouri.
Doctor Montezuma’s Hymn to the Ventilator… you’ll know the universe and the gods… French cleaning ladies in suspension, bathing in pots of cold cream… indispensable for a few days, heightening their voices, sucking cosmic rays.
Vacuums climbing ultraviolet urban zones. Sky 73 in the harmony of spheres, forming a whole, Conrad, Kirwin, Weitz… an experimental menagerie, tainted objects, demolition on earth — Captain Sun is responsible for food and water — will soon be dead, vaporizing euthanasia Texas, with no help from weight, congealed, like Lexington in vinegar… wants to know if the hallucinating traveler of no return has something to say — guinea pigs determining the weight of their organs, circumstantial sketches, spacial information… the astronauts inventory the final phases… Phase 1: recognizing space, degree zero, quite formless — avid crews, embrace the whole thing.
Do you remember? Three Russians, a mechanical technical accident, or?…433 kilometers of distress… Houston Stormfury at the time of catastrophes, the fall of old dreams in a urine analysis. Three centimeters of Skylab, Hurricane NATO… the eye searches the earth, sometimes reaching ecology… an intensely visible planet.
The Geography of the Universe, phase 2: a permanent acquisition for humanity… 29 anomalies to combat every year… snow and rain men… the sun pumping excrements in fusion… future men will be the masters of the energy of matter… an avalanche of time — ears volatilized by experience, America’s distress turned into stars — ocean-cubes in the atmosphere, order abolished in the true Cosmos… the astronauts have returned… bip-bip of the old dream… incredible visions, two and a half billion dollars saved in extremis by Sweet Missouri… an ultraviolet rainbow, operation “Cold Cream” — the astronauts were pieces of bread, Karwin and Weitz transparent, eating with straws, dollars floating in fields of stars — a cosmos with no language doesn’t know itself yet… who knows who will be energy?
Skylab adventurer are intrepid travelers. Astronaut-bases, wide awake men, interchangeable photos, mental space cameras sucking ultraviolet voices… recognizing the three dead Russians in Stormfury … probe-crews… grapefruits made in space, out of cut/ups, tarn in flight, gravitating into Missouri’s ultraviolet rainbow… will die because of those circumstances — leisure of the future — Phase  Orange a focal conscience-catastrophe — Zone doesn’t answer anymore — swirls of excrement, distress-energy… the NASA eye searches America turned into a true cosmos… bip bip bip bip… ultraviolet toothpaste quite hallucinatory… 600 Japanese cutting American nerves in Houston… the call of the sky… the future will teach us. The astronauts have returned.

AMERICAN COLORS

At that very moment American colors and Soviet colors were in space…
The suburb eyes of Los Angeles mixed with vertigoes, to mobs of posters and billboards, to flashing signs, pushing sexes to the end of their ropes. The great sexual hunger landed on the Oakland Ghetto, crouching under the Bay Bridge… A zoo of bitterness, poverty, hate, violence and idiocy… a narrow world where tenderness survives even though eroded by the spiral of the system.
Voodoo night — the dead dance on the city of twisted arms — Old movie and burlesque tickets carried away by the wind. A Californian leper-colony… televised mirages, taxi-shards, a sexual heat wave… I see them all in a flashback on the luminous posters, in sexy cotton balls, in the inventory of dead skins.
A few trips… El Paso, Santa Monica, Frisco, Seattle, Vancouver… tears as blue as the wild iris of Big Sur… Pulverized images inside the show, or in a song I had heard at the El Panama Hotel… personal screams and messages, and the light songs of Police alarms… a tailspin into nerve-mold — words scattered under a microscope… Times Square, the Strip, Avenues B & C, blue prints of Grant Avenue — I think it’s time to talk about the astronaut’s mental equilibrium, brutally mutated in an unknown milieu… what bothers us, what does a man feel like at more than 28,000 feet up?… and what to think about the extraordinary reticence of Leonov and White exactly when they put their spacial cells on?
Was a question of the natural greyness of the man who, body and soul, were participating in a fabulous world premiere?
What to think of the converted and of those who became unhooked?
According to White McDivitt he felt a kind of drunkenness… A distant voice, endlessly repeats, WAR IS A HUMAN THING, WAR IS A HUMAN THING… sprays of neon light on the windshield, an electronic solo in the gazes of Hiroshima- Nagasaki… the spurt of blood in the electrocuted eyes begging for a meager orgasm… painful fragments, emotion retires from the poster.
PENETRATE THIS WORLD BEYOND WORDS —
ACTION — death in a corolla is ambushed on the corner of a street… brief sequences… nothing would have happened if… heavens streaked with black bile… Panama Rose said: We have no time to waste with these gentlemen… Joe Verminex  was ordered to watch over them from afar, from a suburb of frozen fingers occupied by the sexual proletariat.
They came back, alleluia!..
“God is absent”, said one of them.
“Hang up, Rosenberg! You horny viper!”…@ answered the other one.
A fantasy that others had imagined tuned into all the worlds… someone came to buy back His Father’s Kingdom — bright circles grasp Leonov’s hands, who then leaves his seat at the wrong moment, outside the cabin he’s dazzled, as if someone next to him was welding — Lightly, Leonov presses his hands on the side of the ship that moves exactly the way he does, but in the opposite direction… of course, he swears in Russian… swearing in this extraordinary moment… that all the clowns of the Supreme Soviet State are cocksuckers, that the comrades are starting to piss him off… and Belaiev heard it all.
There were a few difficulties for Leonev, (a few worries), when he wanted to return to his spaceship. And he knew how impatient the people on earth were waiting for the end of the experiment. He must have moved a lot in a very short time, with the merest push the space-ship moved away from him, and the KGB bastards, the red spooks got closer.
Leonov and Belaiev saw the red stars, they didn’t see God. McDivitt and White saw the stars on the American flag.
Leonov watched the somber side of the sky through the rays of the sun, pale, very pale — it seemed as if someone had sown black and gold stars — the lenses of the cameras heard it all, the Houston ear sees everything… the immense opacity blushes… in the cabin you had to do everything, you had to come in and go out, go out and in.
You’ll wait forever in the brightness of that light.
Watch out, words die at the slightest pressure…
Leonov leaves his seat and watches the dark side of someone who is welding. How pale he was!… The sides of the spaceship are attacked by pieces of stars.
Scanning the emptiness of the cosmos (that well of hardships) lost in the luminescence, against the clock, returning to the blue-orange, at the appointed time… on earth the CIA and the KGB carved time into propaganda units… brief precise orders… the punks become lyrical… against the sky B & L wiped their hands on a sunbeam — others had already seen that, while speaking to God a long time ago — the cosmonaut’s very slow movements felt the  alienation, and yet they heard the spaceship… no mention, in their reports of the sexual hunger in space… once again, the sky glimpsed through the rays of the sun.
American colors — someone sowed stars… they heard voices… the laborers of space didn’t see the stars scattered by the CIA and the KGB — the cameras came, red phosphorescent orgasms outside the ship, and the earth scratched by blue… coming and going…  Seen from the cosmos the black and blue velvet leaves the air’s seat — emitting from mouth to mouth, that the welder hears on the sly — can you imagine anything deader and sadder than a flag?… luminous signals disintegrate the jukebox… Space Opera… the uninterrupted enjoyment of the camera registering future emptiness.
Chunks of stars, solar oranges…

WORD ECHO

Who dies on that road, in a black Cadillac, repeating I want to pick it up…?
A legend threading its way with colorless blood through the walls of the city.
Violence. Mystery.
Died on the road, on that little dirt path, Cielo Drive, in the middle of boreal trash, facing the assemblage-horizon of an uncertain decade, searing, desperate, breaking silences and words.
It’s early. I must shave, take a shower, dress, have lunch. The first televised news lands in the bathroom, a distant suicide makes me shudder… daylight weaves a veil of blood around the buildings — a blurred film breathes in the empty margin — nothing has changed, operation “For Who Wishes To Hear…”So, let’s wake up abandoning another piece of life, I ask myself “what makes them write?”
There have been many festivals, the one of Pure Idiocy, the one of Spitefulness, there were huge gatherings, Celebrating Promiscuity, Word Echo Solstice… let’s put aside phrases and historic words, agents, spies, terrorists, agitators, hitmen and extra-terrestrials… dreaming I was cut in tatters of immaturity and limit, and my multiple lives were reduced to zero by destiny… they carved my tele-mechanical sex when I decided to write, then I crashed into the wall of Beat and Hip stupidity… so then I left, flashy in someone else’s clothes, avoiding the polluted air-capsules of revolutionary figures — I was the man with the short hair, the man in the grey flannel suit — The Standard of Being Stoned worked day and night (and I never could connect and soar with them) in spite of the insistence of the Psychedelic Fascist Agency… Yesterday’s dream of today in the frayed afternoon… a bomb in the crapper at the Guys & Dolls a week later… the Cosmo fiendish Agency against the Drugstore of Heaven… strange automobile accidents, defamatory murmurs, curious overdoses, sinister communes and permanent harassment… I left, and when I spy them in the windshield I feel sick… I was the target, I still am, even though all my books have been published… Trinket Brigade, Amulets and Dirty Fingernails collapse on the pile of rags of this decade.
Historic festivals in the windowless sink.
My lives decided to write themselves in the time capsules I’ve been collecting for such a long time.
Who dies through those walls in middle of psychedelic trash? Who died so uncertain while he was shaving, thunder-struck by the fool conforming to the rules’ feeble message?
A suicide’s first televised journal and the word that escapes you. Pure idiocy and public mores in the fuzzy clothes encircling the edge of an electrified minute,  between Honolulu and San Francisco — in a dream reduced with the collapsed figures of operation “Day And Night” — dirty nails murmuring to the second underground skin… the junkies of the 50s and 60s had fallen asleep on the already written pages, a shower of cold and burning points breathing close to my body. A blurred film faced the silence and brouhaha of people coming into the city —  unexplainable , distant spitefulness… let us leave aside the words, the narks, the followers, the ragged men, the losers — someone else avoiding what makes them write on the walls of the city… I was the man in the grey flannel suit, the Ragged Agency beat sex to death under pretext of liberty, and God knows what colorless liberation… died on the road, dead, the victim of an overdose, dead under the influence of LSD… I dress, a veil of blood masks the top of the mountain, the Amphetamine Cowboy lunches in the bathroom, the enemy is ambushed in the empty margin, protected by sono and a purple fog of incense and cooking oil — in the distance a black Cadillac, and a gathering of horizon-consciences.

(to be continued…)

all photos (c) Margo Berdeshevsky/2010

"Firdausi Encounters the Court Poets of Ghazna" Attributable to Aqa-Mirak. Page from a Shahnamah for Shah Tahmasp. Iran, Tabriz. Circa 1532.

Marilyn Hacker called my attention to this excellent essay on Qantara, a superb multilingual site subtitled “Dialogue with the Islamic World,” and which I have been perusing for a long time, even though I had managed to miss this 2009 essay.

The Arab Jews

3 - 5 September 2010
Chernivtsi, Ukraine

The major theme of the festival is contemporary German and Ukrainian poetry. The participants are well-known poets from Ukraine, Austria, Germany and Switzerland who will present poetry and video poetry.

The programme of MERIDIAN CZERNOWITZ consists of varying cultural and artistic events. During the day guests will be able to participate in poetry readings, literary discussions, book launches, and cultural excursions. DJs and music producers will hold parties with electronic music. At night, the light projections of the video installation Temple will revive Chernivtsi’s destroyed synagogue.

Translators will be present throughout the festival. The participants’ poetic work will be published in a collection after the event.

The date of the festival has been selected to honour the 90th anniversary of Paul Celan. The famous German-language lyricist was born in Chernivtsi in 1920. To the organisers he stands for the literary tradition of the city that they want to bring to new life.

Paul Celan (1920 – 1970)

For more information visit
www.meridiancz.com/Meridian

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.

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…)

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…)