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Nov 2012 · 3.7k
A Maytide Funeral
Queso Nov 2012
Lazily, a boy with silvery hairs muttering requiem aeternam
lifts his neck at the piercing radiance skimming off the eyeglasses rim,
and there looms the glory, the spotless sea of blue,
varnishes of spring gloss fuming out of the French coronation robe.

The still-brisk branches hung bent at the weight of vivacity,
sight of maidens whose eyes and grace bath in the full warmth of light,
the kisses on the face of the river by the shower of half-bloomed petals,
just as the stillborn thrills of the beating heart to the splintered fingers of Moirae.

The time of adieu,
the season of life.
The mourning procession amidst the lustily caressing May breeze.

-Primavera, thou name be the sweet irony of the dying flowers

The evening wades in, and the coy face of the mountain blushes;
Thence strides away the man whose gaze speaks of premature nostalgia

Here the wind whispers the rosy delirium from the sakura tree at the far side,
the faintness lushly hazed away by the cloudy veil of bittersweet grey.
Queso Nov 2012
Man had wept
as he watched the fall of Lucifer,
not so much due to the tragedy itself,
rather than the cutting, crystalline
beauty of the Icarian descent

After the absence of three hundred years
since the forgotten burning of Magdeburg(1),
when the Devil had returned to Europe
from the smoldering ashes of
South Africa(2),
Namibia(3),
and Congo Free State(4),
the soft hills of Picardy were
embroidered in gold
with roses and clematises

And since our girl had been fed with naught
but the shimmering positivism of Auguste Comte
from a silver spoon manufactured in Manchester,
beneath the charmingly moorish face of a lover
and a Prada he wore
quilted with railway, nation-state,
Art nouveau, electricity,
and liberal democracy,
never in her wildest, most horrendous nightmares,
-one of which was mere few dozen Jews dying in pogroms-
could she possibly imagine
His robust fingers,
so caressingly wrapped around her neck and cheek,
concealing the bayonet claws
of mustard gas and industrialized massacres

A god whose name we only knew
and whose warmth we only read of,
had called for the blood sacrifice of utmost purity,
to be fed to its altars for the promises of salvation

As the Devil ravaged her body frozen as the Siberian gulags
and her soul smoking away to the chimneys of Auschwitz,
he raked his nail to her cheek seized by the throat,
lasciviously whispering,
‘Here, this,
This is the kiss of progress
You have thrown so warmly your arms around’

Ninety-eight years had passed
since that fatal kiss of a lovesome late June,
though the summer days had returned in Picardy,
roses and clematises
no longer bloom on her hills
except as tributes for silenced youth
which petals lay as a civilization’s tears
as shroud over a massive bomb-crater of La Boisselle(5)

And never again, could she fall in love,
notwithstanding all the lover’s whispers
of the rational organization of human society
or the ultimate liberation of the working class,
for in her heart have always lingered,
the shadow of the Devil
whose chilling warmth of the Lubyanka cells
and the fiery dearth of the crematoriums of Poland
we had shared as whole, consummate days of youth

For there lies a tragic aestheticism
in deflowering of a rose just about to bloom,
for one delirious sense of snapping off the stem,
we had burned away all ardor of love for a century

---------
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SackofMagdeburg
(2) Concentration camps were first used as means of civilian incarceration by the British against the Afrikaaners during the Second Boer War
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HereroandNamaquaGenocide
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo
FreeState#Humanitariandisaster
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochnagar_Crater
Queso Jun 2012
‘Twas but a rare, snowy day in Paris,
a January day, as all the lights of the city
rested, as dancers of the Moulin Rouge
fixed their make up during the intermission

And in the graveyard of Père Lachaise
there stood a solitary figure of an old man,
his hands gathered together politely,
in front, clenching on to a tattered flat cap

The man stood in front of a grey wall,
“a tomb without a cross or chapel,
or golden lilies, or sky-blue church windows,”
but with an equally lonesome little plaque
that read, ‘Aux mort de la commune,
21 28 Mai 1871’

He lit a cigarette, from which he took just one puff,
stuck it upside-down on a patch of dirt,
then notwithstanding the thunderstorm
of camera flashes from Japanese tourists,
he started to sing, with a hoarse yet firm voice,
“Debout, les damnés de la terre,
Debout, les forçats de la faim…”

As the wrinkle on his forehead began to stretch,
the dusty particles of ice piled higher and higher
on neighboring graves commemorating
French members of the International Brigades
and Spanish maquis of the French Resistance
-apparently the 3,400 meters height of Pyrenees
was merely a backyard *****
for ideas and fates to tread over barefooted-

His song was a ballad of unrequited passion;
when he got to the chorus about some final struggle
and the unity of human race in a silly hymn,
a song that was never played on a radio,
for which no cool kid would ever
spend $0.99 on iTunes store,
his voice started cracking in amorous choke

The old man was a lifetime lover
in the truest spirit of a Frenchman,
spent all his life trying to charm a girl named Emma Ries,
and whenever he dreamed of holding
the eloquently bruised hands of that sixteen years old seamstress,
his eyes swelled of nostalgic heart,

And he used to cry joyfully,
dropping tears of bullets back in the days,
whether by the guillotine in Place de la Concorde,
behind the barricades of Belleville amidst the cannonballs,
******* in front of the Gestapo firing squads,
or under the truncheons of gendarme in Quartier Latin

As the expired old ******* moaned wet dreams,
hallucinogic delusions of his bygone youth, however,
the chilly, soggy winter of 20th arrodissement piled on,
the ashen slums of Ménilmontant depressingly ugly as always
with brownish-grey molten snow spattered all over
the streets trotted by drug dealers and wife beaters,
and neither the fiery oratory of Maurice Thorez
nor the sanguine grenade of Colonel Fabien
was around to arson the frost into the proletarian spring

In the same winter that the old man sang
the first, only, and last lovesong of his life,
it had been more than two decades already
since the Berlin Wall had tumbled down
and the ruling parties in Greece and Spain,
both socialists,
had just driven 500,000 workers out of their jobs

-J.P. Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Jean Jaures, V.I. Lenin,
Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Blum, Abbie Hoffman-
by the time the old man muttered an old pop-song nobody cared for,
all of those names were as relevant as some Medieval knights,
characters from an obscure chronicle centuries ago,
who died by charging horseback into windmills,
mistaking them for giants that held whom they thought as
a princess of an ugly peasant woman,

Eventually, right before his voice cracked
into an embarrassing fuddle of choked-up tears,
impressive for a seventy something years old,
the man finished the song from his memory,
all the way up to the sixth stanza;
yet the curvaceously splintered palm of a seamstress,
it was still so far away from his hands that’s been pleading
since 1871 for that glorious *******
which once stood so proudly in the face of a Czernowitz magistrate

When the cigarette he stuck upside down on the dirt
burned all the way down, he reached into his coat,
took out a rose, laid it softly, like his own infant child,
in front of the plaque which golden inscriptions
turned grey from unwashed grimes of ages
and as the old fool walked away,
his back turned away from the solemn wall,
there was but one little patch of dirt in the whole of Paris
uncovered by snow, still hoping for the spring to come.

— The End —