Merdaphysic (Traduction de Philipe Fiore et de Kate Rex)

And all that merdaphysic seizes me again, grabs me by my hair, shoves my head into a large plate of soup. Words spin and spin , I drink and drink again until I vomit

All of them yell 'eat' the pope, daddy, and not that , generous generals on staggering horses, a plenipotentiary scoots about on her chair, a banker with breasts and no shade, all of them yell 'eat'. I shout I don't want to, the little girl hanging on my trouser leg screams 'I don't want to'. Her voice is in my voice, right inside my voice. We shout together until our tongues burst.

She turned blind in a Guandong factory assembling my mobile, she was burned alive a dozen times in Bangladesh while sewing my jacket. I killed her intimately again and again, crazed at the back of a car, right in that tiny TV set, in some attic. I made her pray to the dead she did not know, down on her knees, on her knees right inside of me. I struggled to keep her down then up, keep her up then down, keep her up, my lips peel of the rim of the plate where pasta letters swim in a circles I send the soup, pasta and everything flying all over the kitchen wall.

I drink. No drink I don't drink

She vomits now, vomits the comprimise, vomits the quiet breathing of those who work sitting down, those ordering a whore or a pizza, killing themselves thousand times in a day in the same videogame, face deep down in the physical and non taxable daily shit we can count in bread, ounces, severed fingers, crucifixes, crushed tomatoes, metabread, metafingers, metacrucifixes, metatomatoes and where one looks for the broth of his soul, the spirit soup, a corporal compost and where each one grazes, like penned cattle, chews, tears off, devours his soup of anguish just that one, just that one, that unique one, not any other, not the nighttime letter free one, not the dark one, not the one that squirts in the mouths of saints, enucleates common sense, sets fire to the amaranth with petrol, not the one that cripples everyones sweet comfortable life, but the one of the body of the night, its blood, its entrails, and of its inner skin.

She gives up her soul. I collect her last breath. It has to be that way with the dying. You stare at their mouths just in case. Then the last breath, the last howl, a howl in my howl then bitch howl. I drag my ass into cafes I drag my freezing howling ass, my ass that stares at girl's asses and derelicts dying. I'm a bitch, I'm a woman, I'm a vagrant, I'm this piece of indifferent wood, my bone inside me, the bone of the world inside the world, I am a piece of wood cracked by a little girl's scream and that opens the earth to make it burst like a pomegranate. I will ejaculate poetry, spraying burning drops, I will make sure they flood supermarkets, drown fish and poisons, tax havens, disneylands of sorts, your coffee, your toast, your newspaper, your children, and your male and female lovers even the stale gingerbread crumbs feeding roaches at the bottom of a tin box on the kitchen shelf. And this will go on until merdaphysic transforms itself into a beast covered with fragrant flowers that you will sniff like a groundhog sniffs the spring, before you take it by the hand and fuck off ( clear off if you want something more polite) somewhere, at last !

Sitting in the black grass(Traduction de Philipe Fiore et de Kate Rex)

That night, sitting in the black grass

Between two kisses

We stare at our sisters, the stars

Eyes fixed on each other

The children still play in the stream

Silently pebbles fall from the sky

Soft and smooth on our languid bodies

Meteors zip through your clothes

My love

Your hands like seaweed

Your breasts like fishes

Wave, Ocean

Keep your dead

Give us your stories

of the shells’ deep embrace

May you never let this summer end

My love, my love

My heart beats like a nuclear reactor

Crust of the earth

Crust of words

A slow lava of words

Human sweat dripping

Into rivers, the sea, the wind and the mud

Dazzling arteries and vessels

Vibrant, the sun

Returns each day to dig deeper under my skin

Sweat

Sweat!

The leaves of the trees

And the seas solid with plastic

Human sweat!

Wood, tree, bark, sap

Human sweat

I don’t argue anymore

I don’t move

I just wait for the splinter’s embrace

The void between the tectonic plates,

The void between the bodies

Slow moulding of words

The earth leans in lovingly for the uranium kiss

of the nuclear power stations

Your caresses soak down under my skin

Your hands grip my bones

Our radioactive souls

Burn

Signs

Particles

Fission

Crack

My skin falls at your feet

I am naked

I’m naked like I’ve never been

Scorched earth of August

I’m there and I’m not there

I imagine the days

I imagine the nights

Where will you be between each embrace?

Warm, warm, Milk warm?

Scorching scorching

The earth of August!

EXTRACT FROM 'La Tardigrade'(Traduction de Philipe Fiore et de Kate Rex)

It’s not a wave. It’s a sentence. You come back to it every day between the commas of sleep.

You walk in the forest where the trees sit and salute the passing birds, where tents are no different from houses, where paths cross at right angles.

Is it right to say “perpendicularly asymptotic”?

And is it possible that a poem could die?

A tree grows upside down in my beer.

I am frightened that a fish will fall onto the bistrot table.

There is no-one opposite me and I have no glass. I can see right through you

You are nothing that exists and you are nothing that does not exist.

Firebirds do not exist and salamanders do not live in tar. Do you know that?

You don’t live in words either.

A river overflows into the river

that bears your face.

These are not tears or the tide,

barely a puddle that can drown the reflection of the stars.

Perhaps I didn’t throw the anchor high enough

to stop the earth spinning.

Perhaps when I went out shopping

I put the wrong shoes on.

On the edge of the mountain

on the threshold of the house

a leaf that has not fallen from a tree trembles .

***

She has to go out

to free herself from being pursued by the swings.

I’m worried.

I wonder if she understood

that to save herself she has to save the world.

But where should she go? Why leave?

She struggles with the questions

watering the green grass and the ants that have asked for nothing.

An old woman burdened with a bundle of sticks
Possibly the woman on the Led Zeppelin cover, ( the one that we listened to over and over-)

throws out curses

’Is it better to struggle in blood or in ashes?’

She answers.

The old woman does not hear.

So tell me,

What colour is our blood really?

Red?

Black?

Have we ever been truly awake?

She longs to peel the earth, bite into it

and throw the peelings,

into the grass,

in the middle of those ants that look so like red blood cells.

A bitter apocalypse.

’Blood on legs’

She said to herself.

In between the waves

The shadow of my head leans on the shadow of her shoulder

and in the darkness she threw me a smile

that I did not catch.

***

She will fall asleep

In that grass that grows like hair on the earth

My god, it’s so cold in your house!

Truth and Lies on all fours talking on the beach

Truth and Lies taking a piss in the sea

Truth and lies fixing electrodes to a fairy’s breasts

I met Truth and Lies at the supermarket

I am naked beneath my clothes. Do you mind?

She will fall asleep

In that grass that grows like hair on the earth

***

She had a cat with three eyes

that so often liked

to sleep in the fridge

between the mayonnaise

and the apples with 2 stalks

She liked to stare at the sky

and jars of jam.

She had a great fear of the forest

‘Tracking the trunks and finding which branch belongs to which takes too much time.

And so she slept in the arms of everyone and no one