"balzac" poems
We three met
Beneath the Eye In the Sky,
Above the green-blue lake.
You two were sent for a lesson;
I met you to escape.
Stories from long ago
And old films that you two know
Are shining new to me.
One of you loves me
And to the other
I made love.
But in teaching me your lessons,
(Balzac is our favourite!)
You have taught me not to love.
Let us lie here under the sky
Unwatched by others’ eyes,
Away from what you know.
One day you will accept this place,
But then, I will need to go.
Years from now, if you return,
You will still not find me.
Look for my name
On a candle-lit, paper boat,
In the twilight of
Zhongyuanjie
On the blue-green lake.
Jul 18, 2018
Jul 18, 2018 at 11:26 AM UTC
Bury me in Paris, when my heart stops and my eyes open wide,
next to Beckett or Sarte & de Beauvoir, ménage à trois.
Bury me in Paris, where the tourists go,
on the Champs-Élysées, or near the home of Picasso.
Bury me in Paris where the Seraphs scoff and roll their brown eyes
and the saints sell paints on the edge of the Seine’s grime.
Bury me in Paris between the pavement and le Métro,
take my body to whatever stop, just go.
Bury me in Paris on a winter’s night,
beneath the Louvre pyramid light.
Bury me in Paris with Lady Liberty in tow,
make my bed next to de Balzac, next to Marceau.
Bury me in Paris at the foot of l’Obélisque
accompanied by pharaohs, exhumed.
Bury me in Paris, leave me there, I guess,
in the hotel room overlooking the Arc. I, fully dressed.
Bury me in Paris while listening to Robespierre’s final scream,
the silence drowned out only by the guillotine.
Bury me in Paris, Montrouge, your angel calls to me,
that one who serves macarons at the head of the Tuileries.
Bury me in Paris, with the Angel, unimpressed,
next to her, I, in eternal rest.
Bury me in Paris, toss me off Bir-Hakiem, splashing,
or under tour Eiffel in the springtime night, waking.
Bury me in Paris, my body yearns to be free and true,
but if I am to die in New Orleans, bon Ange de Montrouge,
Bury me there with the jazz worms, singing:
“Angel, come to me, come to me, Angel, come.”
Jul 31, 2013
Jul 31, 2013 at 3:26 PM UTC
I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.
And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.
Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savour Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.
Chekov is caviare to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.
I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read.
3k
Once I looked to the Bard for words profound;
ageless, his wisdom ran unabated.
Yet Hamlet is now ideologically unsound,
“the slings and arrows” historically Iocated.
I wept for the creature of Frankenstein,
spurned by his master, forced to roam the Earth.
But I’d been subjectively positioned in a paradigm
by Mary’s anxiety about childbirth.
I read Balzac, Hardy and Henry James
describing “worlds” which seemed quite sensible.
Now Eagleton’s exposed their bourgeois games
I find them morally reprehensible.
I dreamt of being Robinson Crusoe
or proud, fierce Hawkeye in his buckskins dressed,
but Fenimore and Defoe have to go,
they’re culturally encoded and empirically obsessed.
Inspired by Guinness, did James Joyce sit down
to see what magic flowed when he was ******
The stream of Ulysses floats Bloom-about-town
dreamthinkingnever : “I’mamodernist”.
I’d gladly give Woolf a Room of Her Own
and be one of the boys with Hemingway,
but sensitive guys leave their bulls alone
say de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.
No more fun with Wordsworth being daffodilly,
no simple pleasure reading Mickey Mouse;
Steamboat Willie can’t help but look silly
dissected by Foucault and Levi-Strauss.
The Bible shows intertextuality
says the two Jacques, Lacan and Derrida.
Judas, a construct of bisexuality?
The **** fixations of Herod are?
It’s got so bad I deconstruct a holiday brochure.
I can’t even **** without Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure.
Feb 25, 2015
Feb 25, 2015 at 12:06 AM UTC
Thanks thespis for another muse anew,
Filliping my soul with the spirit of a song,
To chant for the young world in these pepperish letters,
before my callous eyes on the skull of historical future
on my pykitonic torso of I another African pykin,
as I finish my coffin for the cadaver of poetry
that the law of poetry is a distorting neurosis,
neurotic abnormality its baseboard of time
giving classical balance for wondrous poetry.
Compensatory motivation a charm of its seed,
Taking dear eyes from the skull of Demodocos
Leaving songfull mouth his legacy for humanity,
Warped physique not short of history,
Teaching the world to drink in full pyrene spring
As hunchbacked dwarfism of Alexander Pope
was not in any sense dwarfism of his poetry,
nor club foot of Byron in ******* to Maugham
Byronic heroism to Europe of yester times,
That sired Proust, the Jewish neurotic
And Keats the most dwarfish and Wolfe the tallest
Of man and woman to the cultural matrix
Of Europe, the mother of art, poetry and synaethesia,
From which was born Pushkin that took poetry
Out of his nymphomaniac heart, to the solace of czars,
And Shakespeare the dear thief, luckily converted
Childhood kleptomania into royal theatre of King Lear,
The parallel of four brothers from the house of Karamazov,
Their father; impecunious penny penchant muzhik
In the name of Fydor epileptic Dostoyevsky.
A lull of the time to escape from world of rent and tax,
Gripped nerves of the duo to a new realm of art
wherein sensuous glory from ***** and Indian hemp
propelled the souls of Coleridge and De Quincey
to grandiose highness of poetry in the dreams of *****
bordering on the teutonic greatness of ritualistic breed,
poetry that transcended from rotten apples in the writing desk
of Fredriech von schiller the begotten son of Germany,
writing under the arms of Balzac dressed in monkey clobus,
that along with Milton in the lost paradise, gave him swaddles
only when the poetic vein of Milton flowed happily from nothing,
but from the ritualized autumnal equinox to the spiritual vernal,
as Coleridge was in full recondite of marquetry,mosaic and miracles,
the miraculous white male sheep, the white ram of Wole Soyinka,
that he gave as a gift to Achebe at the last anniversary, evil decoy
that become a car which deathly crushed Chinua Achebe
down to demise in the catacombs for the law of poetry
as abnormal human neurosis an equation of perfect art.
Jun 6, 2014
Jun 6, 2014 at 8:26 AM UTC
I sat on Balzac’s lap, Betula said.
The psychiatrist twitched his nose,
Scribbled notes. Where was this?
Outside a Paris cafe. He looked up
At her and stared. Were you alone?
No Balzac was there. He scribbled
More notes, his pen moved quickly
Across the page. Anyone else?
My grandmother. Can she substantiate
You sitting on Balzac’s lap? Yes, she
Was there. Where about does your
Grandmother live? She doesn’t.
Doesn’t what? He asked. Live. She
Died some years back, but she does
Visit. The psychiatrist frowned, scribbled
More notes. Do you see anyone else?
Yes, my sister, Alice. Is she dead, too?
Oh, no, she lives at home with Mother.
He sat back in his chair that squeaked.
Betula put her hands on the arms of
Her chair and moved them backward
And forward, studying the psychiatrist,
His deep set eyes, his thick brows, his
Thin lips. Why did you sit on Balzac’s lap?
He asked. Because he said I could, she
Replied, feeling the warmth from rubbing
Her hands on the arms of the chair. Do you
Know who Balzac was? He asked. He said
He was a writer, Betula said, putting
Her hands in her lap. He died in 1850,
The psychiatrist said. Yes, I know,
Betula muttered, he said. He scribbled
More notes. He gazed at her. It’s all in
Your mind, he said, these things you say
You see and do. Balzac said you’d say that,
She replied, said no one would believe what
I said about him and sitting on his lap.
The psychiatrist took out a peppermint,
Put it in his mouth and ****** Betula
Looked over his head and said, Grandmother
Says I’m done for, Balzac says, I’m ******
Feb 3, 2013
Feb 3, 2013 at 2:58 PM UTC
Balzac is beading,
Robespierre is reading,
Introversion I am needing,
Reflections I am heeding,
In old bat cave central,
Like an ancient Sybil, hypothetical,
Wisdom is supposed to come with age,
As Balzac turns his own page,
Why am I more religious than the Pope?
Can any faith give Earthlings hope?
Better than folk smoking dope!
If you have a problems embarrassing,
Bring them here for my listening,
Sage advice I am providing,
Reflections I am heeding,
Yes, boys, beer understands,
How did dinosaurs make it in Pleistocene lands?
Answer: they didn't, for beer, no hands,
Yes, reflections I am heeding,
Humans are minute cosmic specks, spinning,
On a pebble in Outer Space, clinging,
If gravity didn't **** we'd all be floating,
Reflections I am heeding,
As Robespierre shall keep reading,
Then Balzac shall be beading......
Aug 16, 2016
Aug 16, 2016 at 1:37 AM UTC
Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast
Into the sere of virginal decay,
I view her as she enters, day by day,
As a sweet sunset almost overpast.
Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,
Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,
And on her chignon's elegant array
The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.
She talks Beethoven; frowns disapprobation
At Balzac's name, sighs it at 'poor George Sand's';
Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands;
Speaks Latin with a right accentuation;
And gives at need (as one who understands)
Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.
1.6k
i've learnt that the greatest
prompt and subsequent
impromptu to yet another poem
is to be constantly dissatisfied
with one's output,
because there's hardly a solemn
care for so little with so much
intent: prose writers are due
respect for hammering
so many little and big words into
novels with an odd flash of
poetic genius, poets are always
left dissatisfied because of this,
their open-plan scribbles are
the compensation odes to the bulk
of bulging plotted out scenarios
of fiction - i too wish i had the
capacity to write so much, bound
by 21 volumes of a Dickens or a Balzac,
but whereas they have their endless
stream of words and compensate
very little in terms of poetic economics,
i can:
do this
do that
and revel
in the blank trimmings
of a rim
of a canvas:
with each dispute
the white, the snow
grin of defeat;
or like the chinese poets said: haiku yin-yang
the poem must be,
less mechanism of anything,
more association of mechanisms as you elsewhere;
well less art more **** make each poem
a yin-yang assimilation - x-ray the renaissance paintings
and the impressionists, and the still-life
painters and the cubists and realists and the pre-raphaelites...
Mar 6, 2016
Mar 6, 2016 at 4:47 PM UTC
in the age of super fast optic coptic broadband connectivity,
writing had to leave the lives of respectable corset donning girls
who’d lounge all day with balzac and long tennyson stanzas,
who’d read for relaxation...
sorry to break it to you huckleberry finn...
but reading these days is all about distraction...
distraction distraction distractions...
plenty of them in the “real” world too... it’s called the goldfish
salute... slàinte mhath... dheagh shlàinte...
next time you hear an advertisement don’t think of promotion
(that’s done through the ol’ word o’ mouth)...
think more on the lines: ailing company... ailments in general...
a public relations stunt... for those grandiose profit margins;
true that... when a man is sick, has a cold a fever,
he is prescribed paracetamol... when it's a company...
the economic model prescribes the medicine known as advertisement.
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 27, 2015 at 7:22 AM UTC
to avoid all apparent anger, please read the italicised parts of transcendent importance.
when i was a child i was told i was born with a birth mark,
a chernobyl signature,
told i was enclosed in the womb and safest there,
but i doubt that now...
few positives of telling a child he was born with cancer,
but as my egyptian fuckjoy schoolfriend would tell you:
beat cancer with the brain bleeding,
or as i would like to say, in analogy -
*poet comes up to a philosopher and says:
pick on someone your own size, like Balzac, or Tolstoy*.
my fuckjoy friend doesn’t get it still,
it’s a shame, i hope he gets it one day,
i was duped into this cancerous affair
because mine surfaced just below the skin
and shimmered it’s purply sick colour to be later removed...
but the bleeding brain though, can’t get enough of that,
but my egyptian friend here ****** the bearded lady and (
aby w zyciu był smacek, raz dziewczynka... raz chłopacek )
is about to tell me i’m not allowed jokes
about how to size up, man up and do a beatles cover
on the covers album: the beetle incident of:
live and swallow *** loads?
he ought to now, he’s touring america now,
with a bucketload of **** of prayers for the courtroom
so he can buy that mercedes benz and look the constipated part
in the shire of middle class england;
hey egyptian bro, tell your daddy i’m sending him an x-ray
to qualify him to the status of mr. surgeon
rather than what he already is, dr. radiologist -
oh look at me, i can count to one hundred using a ******* calculator.
Oct 17, 2015
Oct 17, 2015 at 10:23 AM UTC
In the middle of the night
I share this poem with you
What do you know
what do you see of me?
A few patches of black
carved in the white of a screen
a few sad words trying to soothe
what is left of me
I live secluded in an apartment
downtown of a half a million souls' city
founded by the Atlantic ocean
I live a cosy and quiet life
sometimes going out to feed myself
and breathe the lousy air of town
Me and my few friends gather once every week
to share a drink
to exchange meaningless thoughts
and useless ideas
around the fate of man
the hopeless prospect of our destiny
We are bachelors around forty
We were born wild and hard
offshoots of the oddest
long gone sycamores
rooted in the most infertile soils
We used to read powerful litterature
Nietzsche, Kafka, Broch,
Joyce, Balzac, Beckett,
Shakespeare, Goethe and Bernhard
to name a few
But none of them has ever helped us out
to find a heart to love
and a pristine soul to care for
All the books we read
have tormented us
with many questions and relentless issues
Now we sit still in our chairs
and watch the clouds go by
hoping for the next blue sky
hoping for the next feeling to come
And never do we ask when...
Sep 15, 2014
Sep 15, 2014 at 11:09 PM UTC
i still remember my great-grandmother
talk about the second world war
and living on the front, where all
the fighting took place,
three days before she died i had a dream
with a clock-face pointing toward
three o'clock (whether a.m. or p.m.
i don't know), at the funeral,
after being taken from the little
church in one cemetery to another
where my great-grandfather was buried
on a bus with other mourners,
i remember the priest citing something
and bursting into a little laugh, not loud
enough to be looked at with scorn
by everyone, but loud enough for the
person sitting next to me to notice -
oh the futility of the priesthood at explaining
what Balzac would call the human comedy;
at the burial site, when the closest of kin
were given flowers and throw the flower
onto the coffin... i was told to do likewise...
and then they heard me perfectly enough
to scorn me, one word: NIE! (no!),
later i confessed i wasn't going to do a
guns 'n' roses november rain music video moment,
and what sort of tradition is it to throw
flowers into a darkened pit with a human being
reduced to being laid in a bulging matchstick?
i went with my cousin to get the wreaths,
offered him a cigarette, took the flower my
grand-parents' home, we sat their celebrating
the wake (stypa) - getting drunk and eating...
later that night i sat in the kitchen by candlelight
and managed to grind my teeth that i chiselled
off a piece of one... burning the flower just a little,
i don't remember what flower it was,
it was red though, and i burnt the flower just a
little, creating a purple patch on it.
i only remember my great-grandfather as a shade,
in retirement he was security guard in the
kindergarten, and i remember only one thing:
he played the big piano, and i played a small toy piano;
the shade figure of everyday grey;
and when he died, being only 4, i wasn't allowed
to go to the funeral, and so i stayed behind at home
and played with Lego with one of my uncle's friends.
Mar 10, 2016
Mar 10, 2016 at 7:21 AM UTC
The light began to dim because
the oil was running low and the
morning came a creeping up
as if I didn't know,
never meant to be the stranger
I am Tonto to the Sunshine Ranger.
Invincible
I am the storm
reap me, read me
in the early morn.
In spite of me
I write of me
my protestation is but
the denunciation of
previous wrongs
and the megalo' in me
dressed as Romeo
sees the spotlight on me
as I put on
the one man show.
Behind these masks
there are certain deeds and tasks
of which I shall not mention.
Against the rule of
Isaac
Balzac
vitamin A and
Prozac
I would tack this to the end
but the end is yet to be and
in this the truth could be
nothing more than
ripened Brie
( nice to spread upon your bread,
but fit for nothing else)
I would be a Jane
but I am John
also a Christian
and how do I carry on
this thread?
What I see inside is
beyond me
as fathomless as a
bottomless sea
I never understood
how could I?
the third eye
is blind.
Between the cemetery
and the library
a sign that reads,
here lies my poetry
RIP.
.
May 28, 2018
May 28, 2018 at 12:09 PM UTC
The park is full of sheep-dogs
Who have been retired for generations
A drunken bench dweller
Offers a freshly married couple
His congratulations
Mazda, le chanteur fou
Fais tres attention a les francais
Lire Balzac / franchement
Fais tres attention a la menage a trois
Slow Joe of Place Sathonay
Roadside raconteur with a previous wife
Watches the afternoon's petanque
From eyes in the wall
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017 at 8:04 AM UTC
Pere-lachaise is just the place
to be a writer for
Morrison and Oscar have taken up
a permanent residence
Hugo is beautifully miserable there
and Balzac just loves the dead
life can be very funny; he says
among the tombs and catacombs
in the necropolis of the city of light
a place to die for.
Sep 16, 2018
Sep 16, 2018 at 1:40 PM UTC
On the merry go round again friend
Meal deals for lunch
Carbs for dinner
Send help the summers coming
Everybody wants to be thinner
Here I am in my boxer shorts
And socks of course
Posing in the mirror
Rubbing baby oil on my chest
Yes look how I glimmer
The lights always been poor in my room
Tonight it seems to be dimmer
Summer daylight savings gloom
And now I’m craving pints and bbq food
I’m in the mood for something carcinogenic
Remember the pandemic reading Balzac?
Come on wash your hands on my ********
What you want to achieve?
Anything because I believe
Everybody’s got a voice in their head
Mines here to talk you into my bed
I had my sheets hanging out on the line
They smell fine hey it’s summer time
Sun dried black holes spread on my toast
I’m dilating time unlike most
Pull up a chair baby I can be your host
Cherry red lips and mint chocolate chip eyes
Put you on a cone and sell you at a price
It’s called supply and demand
Not demand and supply
**** I guess thats why you’re not here aye
Photogenic stretch marks
Got me sending love hearts
I’m in the mood for something carcinogenic
You’re sweet aroma and your melanomas
Baby now it’s finally the time
You’ve got your hands wrapped in mine
Isn’t this sublime in the summertime?
Loving your body because it’s fine.
What you want to achieve?
Anything because I believe
Everybody’s got a voice in their head
Mines here to talk you into my bed
I might as well be dreaming
Because this is heaven
I might as well be dreaming
Because this is me believing.
Apr 22, 2025
Apr 22, 2025 at 2:40 AM UTC