To the Poet Matthew Dickman



When you mentioned a crow
I thought of Allan Poe
Yet your words wielded
Allan Ginsberg’s queerness
Your awesome Americanness
Shuffled Allan’s wit
With your heart and gut.

You gave us a performance
But none of that heart and flowers
Romance
You were real and raw
On paper, in person
Personifying
Writing about it all.

Out of your world came out
The ardent desire to feed the pyre
Of ravenous demanding poetry
With no rhymes but sentences
A sentence which sent on death row
The rest of the worlds I heard today.

Words are wasted but yours resembled
A cherry-shed coke’s can, vintage 1975.

Lyon, November 6, 2016

Tonight, in the black light of a slight hope

Tonight, in the black light of a slight hope
With my chalk I’ll describe you:
I’ll begin with your mouth
Beaded with gold, as tasteful
As sponge finger. I’d want to
Softly touch you.
I’d kiss your mouth
So languorous and red.

Two rubies in the air of tonight
Shining with mischievous liberty
My fingers gently move up
Your sight seeks me, sometimes flees
They are always within a reach
But statuesque, you count on me
To be, on the inside, Prometheus
For you know that your dear heart matters.

Tonight, in dark of a quixotic manor
And of that gasp of yours
When I hold you
Drawn by the quill your power
Is giving birth to, mirage, o male mage
And under my ink I possess
The complexion of your skin, your coloring
I hold your slumbering head.

I’d continue with your hips
That I’d slightly, in time, skim
Flower of a new spring
In the naked, wet and white warmth
Of your body. All of a sudden, you’d shout
Panting, you’d feel on the small of your back
The lingering stopping of my chalk
On you, fluttering.

The line is rushed
Because under your sighs I yield
A daring dove
I am for you, I hungry for you.

In a stream-like momentum
I plunge into you willing
To grab you, to know you’re my hope
In the silent and black night…

And the tongue of your flesh
Stains the drawing because your breast
Willing to itemize my drawing
Sketches you with a light-hearted air!

You are then
On this canvas
My tender gold
My long star

Art of a love
Which means much more
Oh so much more
Than what words convey!

Written on October 8, 2015. Translated in February 2016.

To Laurentin,
Skylark

Another sheet of paper for you with inked words
Pretending to pretentiously carry metaphors:
Lights for February, for anchored loves
Becoming projected, mundane candle holders.

The shadows in the room sketch your silhouette
You’ll hear dawn: shrieks of the skylark;
Cuddled in a precious dream, in the drapes of your shape
Multiplying the room with your sighs,  saying… more…

I’ll think on you, in you, and then for you:
Your breath, your jolts, your smiles, your sounds
Will be my compasses,  capricious circle
Naked ‘fore the Universe, under the skies of your roof.

And sealing upon your mouth tonight’s stars
The flask of my air offers you the threads
Of my words’ desire, a black supple river
On that day, no roses, but the lovers’ span…

Written in Lyon on Valentine’s Day 2016.

Poem-report: Greece

Writing poetry in the Hellenic region
Equals to discussing democracy
In Athens, its cradle then despotic tomb
The poem can’t survive in this rather cracy.

Greece however always belongs to pugnacious Achilles
Keeping the mythical beauty of its temples and islands:
The sea is as clear as the thin aquamarine
Which used to ornate Pallas’ bust, sibyl.

And what of Apollo, supreme oracle of Delphi
He is done delivering visions, no one calls out his name
The poet summons him, but he fails to arrive
What can he make of sanctity or lent?

The deity’s site looks as wild as it was then
Between an ochre mountain and a rising sun
The stray cats and dogs, worshipers of the past
Are the only believers who now crowd the p(a)lace.

Greece is pauper alas, and exploits its legends
To obtain some drachm from European folks:
Statues and vases, paintings and almonds
Everything is copied and sold–what a Herculean task!

What sad realization takes hold of the voyager
To follow the tracks of heroes, eager
Athens is filthy, and to heal her gray boyishness
The acropolis is yours for about thirty euros!

Men of our time have desacralized
What had been dreamt about when barely imagined
Glory only remains in what you can read of it
I almost couldn’t find some muses and their lyre.

Written in French in Athens, March 31, 2017
Translated in Lyon, April 19, 2017.

In Memoriam,

Where is the face that launched a thousand ships?
Girls of the age of the waves are named after her
Helen, whose Sparta is now a mundane village
No one breathes in her mythical sillage
No one grabs her golden belt above the hips.

Where is the lithe Hermes and his winged sandals?
Women of today wear him daily on their necklaced throne
Around the neck and the perfume, a scarf is thrown
Do you know of this French house creating scandals?

Does Apollo know he has been sent into space
In an intricate horse of iron called eleven
Here’s hoping he saws the strings of Lyra
He, bringing poetry and Letters to grace.

What about the boastful Paris and his pride?
Cursed by Aphrodite and Helen’s eloper
What would he know of the City of Lights
Paris, paradise of lovers to reach new heights…


And what to say of fair Spartan Hermione
The incarnated actor making much more money
From Hermione to Emma but none of the myth
Both had to fortunately grit their teeth…

Ajax the Lesser who forced himself on Cassandra
Still tears your household and floor asunder
Warrior whose name now scrubs the dust
Off nowadays lame palaces, bound to rust…

Homer, father of the epic poem of Greece
You should hide under your sheep’s fleece
What would you say to the yellowish Cyclops
Benighted idiot, pondering on donuts!


Lyon, March 2- March 4, 2017

The hidden rite

The labradorite scaled skin glistens
Full of cyan as well as cyanide
Fantastic fish it finds the stream
In the crease of the cliff to hide.
On one hand it meets the core
Of nature. It is telluric till the end
The labradorite kisses the lore
On the other hand, a legend.
The slippery fish follows, swerving
The selfish body of water
Displaced, it becomes sensual
Yet it’s just a fish as usual.


November 12, 2016
Lyon

This season births a golden brown hue
Painted on red leaves heaved
By the warm wind this fall evening
One can read the imprint of time which stuns
A network of living paths, on the brown veins
Like a body’s own, lifted
Led, by October ravished
Over the hills and dunes.

This network of veins I own
Forming this soft orange dream
And this hair tousled
By the season’s fire, mad about
The golden muses’ whispers, fairies
The tracks of the stealthy squirrels
Vivid ribs imprinted into the warm clay
Keep my feet to this fall soil
This secret carved into yew.

Appoline
Translated and written on October 24, 2016.
Lyon