Mon hippocampe,
Donne-moi juste deux minutes
Le temps que je te vaccine
Religieusement
De ma machette
Le temps que je chante ma diane :
La la la la la la la la la lo lé lo la !
La la la la la la la la la lo lé lo la !
Je psalmodie
Un, deux,
Un, deux, trois...
Un, deux,
Un, deux, trois...
J'offre cette rumba à la santé de nos petites morts
De ces petites morts
Qui nous précèdent, nous suivent et nous hantent.
Au son des trois tambours de la rumba
Tu chantes faite bouteille de rhum
Et je te réponds en choeur cuillère et verre vide.
A la première reprise, chassée croisée,
Tu chantes le thème
A la deuxième reprise, mollets cambrés,
Je chante aussi couteau et toi assiette.
A la troisième reprise,
Moi, rayon de lune de lune,
Toi, croissant de soleil,
Frappons des mains à l'unisson
Communions avec nos morts sur l'aire de danse
Qu'ont foulée leurs chevaux de possession
Qui nous tiennent encore en bride
Et contiennent nos ombres.

Je me présente : Orphée
Je bombe le torse et je te dévisage
Tu te présentes : Eurydice
Tu te déhanches avec malice et tu me toises.
Un, deux,
Un, deux, trois...
Un, deux, trois,
Un, deux...
Mélangeons les syncopes,
Pervertissons la parade,
Convoquons un nouveau rituel,
Désarticulons la chorégraphie,
Nos corps interchangeables fusionnent
En une seule ombre :
Tu m'aguiches,
Je trémousse des épaules,
Tu m'habilles et déshabilles de tes passes,
Et je te chevauche de mon foulard écarlate en miroir inversé.
Viens en marchant
Dansons, marchons,
Suivons la clave
Vêtus de blanc
Gratifions nos petites morts d'une rumba
Plions, élevons, sautons, cabriolons
Retombons, tortillons, détortillons
Cambre le dos que je me déhanche !

Entre postures et figures
Improvisons, rusons, sautons-matons
Caracolons
Dans le chaud tempo
Des trois tambours de la rumba.
Et si je te vaccine
A l'improviste
Dérobe-toi, esquive-toi, nargue-moi
Pour que nos petites morts applaudissent à tout rompre
Leurs virtuoses
Et tortillent elles aussi du croupion .

Je suis Orphie, fils d'Orphée et d'Eurydice
Petits fils d'Oeagre et de Calliope,
Bercé par les Muses et les Naïades
J'ai hérité de la lyre à sept cordes
D'Apollon et j'en ai rajouté deux
Rien que pour caresser ma Muse
Ma voix est miel
Ma voix est feu
Ma voix est pierre

Elle joue, elle chante, elle danse

Elle s'insinue comme un fleuve secret sous la roche et la fissure
L'attendrit et elle s'élève tel un ballon et flotte dans le vent

Elle dévie le cours des laves en fusion
Et pénètre au coeur du Stromboli intime
De la colère des Muses
Quand elles se font Furies.

Elle dompte les bêtes féroces et charnelles
A distance elle fait fondre
Les résistances et les fantômes

On m'appelle aussi Amore

Les Furies pourront me déchiqueter

Me mettre en lambeaux

Me jeter comme mon père du haut du mont Rhodope

Je chanterai encore du fond des mers

L 'amour de mon éternelle Muse

Ma naïade bien aimée

Nue.

An aesthetic is a polished stone of truth.
Where beauty shines its insight
Onto a multitude of reflective curves and planes.

Small wonder the world smiles upon the couple.
Who have shifted the surfaces they slipped from.
Orpheus and Eurydice reunited:

Having finally tripped out of the cave and into the sun.
Their outward smiles shining with the inner joy of a sight regained:
Love is the greatest beauty of them all.

I was not born of god and muse.
Pictures of virtuosic health  
captured in epic poetry
that I don’t want to write.

The music I make charms my world.
Trees and rocks
obey not the wind and current,
but the meter of my songs.

You too fell for tricks of snake,
though my tune called your name
long before they evaded my coil.

Forgive me, I won’t question your sleep below.
For even the rules of your warden dictate
you can’t look forward
while you’re looking back.

I could be your Orpheus.
Which is to say that even after death
you won’t get rid of me.

I could be your Orpheus,
but with the way his story goes
wouldn’t you say I’m probably
more like his lyre.

Next to your pyre
Nest to your flame
I am ashamed by my mortality

these days have made ash accumulating of me
the grown-up ghost I'm taken to be
a soundless sonder

Through another man's lens
through another boy's poem
you are still beautiful to me

Some other man's Eurydice
Some boy who didn't turn around
when faced with the world only a few steps away

Now I am buried under this city
practicing sleepless nights
I talk to you backwards and pray for the world to begin again

a double exposure in third person
the picture makes sense, the pieces don't fit together
My schizophrenia in monochrome

Limerance,
though spurious
pending supplication

I hear your lyre cries
I hear your grief and sorrow
I hear your love for me.

You refuse to listen as they tell you
That I am too far beneath the surface
Trapped in the clutches of death's flames.

My beautiful minstrel, no longer incandescent
Do you think Apollo would be proud of what you've come to?
You roam around with your lyre of gold,
Yet you have killed your flame for love lost.

I miss the way you enchanted all of Greece with your melodies
You now make the gods and goddesses weep in pity;
You make the flowers wilt and die of sadness,
You make even the sirens wail of broken heartedness as
they drive away the sailors who were once enchanted by them.

Do you see the beautiful might of the songs you sing?

O Orpheus, listen to me when I tell you to stop searching for me:
Do not enter the caves and traverse the darkness once more
A darkness you are not meant to be in,
Darkness you are too precious for.

I hear your lyre cries
I hear your grief and sorrow
I hear your love for me
And I am sorry I could not come back with you...

But listen now, my love
Although you long for me still
I am now the only thing in your world
That your music cannot bring back to life.

I would have rather been Orpheus,
travelling to various hells for you
and singing songs to save you
even though you couldn't save yourself:
stop looking back. The flames aren't worth it.
Let my eyes burn brighter than the abyss.
Just whatever you do don't turn your face
away Eurydice. Hades will have his Persephone
and you are not her.

It's better this way I guess. I would have looked
back at you and watched you crumble into
a shadowy pillar of salt as did the wife of Lot
when she looked back at *****. I am faithless,
which is why I cannot sing like Orpheus. I am faithless,
which is why I would have watched you melt into
a shadowy memory of the underworld even if I could.

Instead, I was a messenger of these strange myths.

Wings on my feet, I raced against the multitudinous
skylines of the worlds I do not inhabit, skipped across
volumes and volumes of rows and columns of planets and
stars written by dead old men and women. They spoke presently
of the voluminous presence their absence had created, and did so
without having known of the secrets of this absence when
they wrote about their respective presents. Presents conferred
to winged-feet wishful thinkers who spiral uncontrollably with their mouths
to sudden and dangerous depths: Every serious reader remembers
the time they stopped whispering controversies and started shouting them
without knowing that they were shouting them: Ideas are messy things
that don't need loudspeakers: Decibels violently shudder themselves out
of being the moment you mention to your mother that God
might not exist and Camus said so: Existence itself implodes outwards
like how plants produce seeds that make themselves when novels
start at their ends which are really their beginnings: Children
**** their mothers through birth: Boys with wings on their feet
take the library too seriously.

This is
          how
and
          where
I flew towards you without a chariot

and found you in your various hells, one book at a time,
and why I would have rather have been Orpheus
because at least then I could have sang you songs
before you ended up retreating back into your various
selves. It could have been my fault then for looking back.

It could have been,
   could have been,
   could have been
you that was Orpheus. You who looked back.
You being the reason that I crumbled into a pillar of
shadow and salt because, as did Lot's wife, I looked back.

We both did, and watched the whole world invert itself
on its axis, then turn and twist and shift itself
into superimposed images and shapes and dreams
that changed you from muse to poet and
dream to dreamer
and Eurydice to Orpheus
and to Lot then his wife
and to this: which you always were.

              Those wings on your feet: When
the librarians changed the positions of the bookshelves-
and therefore our imaginations: our movements
and stanzas and scenes and days and nights-
               Those wings on your feet: When
that happened they must have stopped fluttering
for a second. I tried flying again and fell.

I haven't been much of a messenger since.