i wish (but it's all in vain)

i wish (i wish i wish i wish)

i wish (i wish i wish)

but it's all in vain (it's all it's all in vain in vain)

~Chumbawamba

Morning by Edvard Munch

i wish i could see troy davis

sitting at the right hand of the father

encompassed in a hallowed light

while angels at his shoulders

sing the hallelujah chorus

and all the little beasts of burden

throng at his sandaled feet

i wish i could see jews and arabs from

all the great lands of the middle east

hand each other olive branches

and call each other auntie cousin niece

as tears stream down their cheeks
in a moment of great reconciliation
with acts of heroic forgiveness

i wish (in vain perhaps)
that western powers would donate
one meal a day from each of its citizens
and that such a simple act would lessen
the body fat of overweight americans
and end the hunger pangs of
continental africa and everyone else

i wish someone would tell us

what those planes crisscrossing
the blue skies are spraying and why
i wish i could stop thinking about it
and watch the old cloud forms roll by
as sweet winds cool the summer heat
and rains fall down to cleanse the earth

i wish they would discover
the cause of my disease
and i could experience a day again
without this pain and misery
may no one else live 15 years 
with perpetual pain and zero care
and the disbelief of ignorant doctors

i wish we would destroy
every weapon in our arsenals
all the guns of china and russia
pakistan israel columbia
india libya united states france
every weapon yes the end of wmd
talk to everyone and live in peace

this fragile peace does not exist

not peace but cold wars
cold wars turned to hot wars
violated women innocent children
begging dinars at car doors
and at the end of the fumes
an iraqi sunset and the bitter dregs of war

i wish i wish i wish
but it's all in vain but it's all in vain
i wish i wish i wish
but it's all but it's all but it's all
in vain in vain ...

Video by moineau

je suis francophile

i want a croissant

biftek poulet alain bashung

i want a new language

a post cinema verité

an avant garde nouvel roman

i want a song about lyon

or strasbourg or toulouse

i want to be pédé in gay paris

or bi- in bretagne

I want to sit in an old theatre

and drink in bérénice

then go home and 

write poetry à la ferré

i want to be risqué

i want to be un grand

i want an old barn for maison

and a terrace sur la seine

i want to take a train to cannes

and try this poem over again

i want to say "je vous aime"

like a true patriot

for once in my life

i want to say "vive la france"

without the guilt

and throw off the shackles

i've felt since i was twelve

this American nightmare

adieu vietnam

bienvenue afghanistan

an endless maladie

tying me to a couch

with pills and pain

year after year after foutu year

my heart bursting with desire

my soul longing to speak

but the words are always foreign

always à la française

so no one gets the poems

even if my accent is good

6 avril 2008

the dregs of nightmares

Edvard Munch, L'enfant malade (1882)

 
the world is different today
since she woke from that nightmare
a hostile place where
two crows chase an osprey
high into the sky
taking turns diving up at it
across miles of treeline

a place where a sick person
abandoned with a child
cannot rise to the occasion
doesn't have the ability
to go out and take the bus
figure out where the schools are
or go grocery shopping

meanwhile the guilt
of being a total burden
hangs like bitter fruit
and while all these thoughts
are deafening in her head
everything seems to synthesize
into a blinding blankness

what to do what to do
with all this nothingness
her body throbs with pain
as the incessant september rain
returns to oregon and
pounds down whatever is left
of intelligent consciousness

there is always sleep
temporary or eternal
one precluding the other as
her heavy eyes and slack jaw
drift down to the keyboard
and the roar of cars through water
becomes a hymn for her hopelessness

Bel hommage à Alain Bashung

tu vas toujours continuer dans nos cœurs, tous les mots sont les tiens, tu es partout...

Hommage - Alain Bashung by Muse-iciens

before the fall

Pieter the Elder Bruegel, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562)

if i learn one lesson

let it be this

there is a tripwire

in my consciousness

and in front of it is a pit

that is endless

once my foot gets caught

and i begin to fall

my eyes will be blinded

by sand and rock

and my ears shall erupt

in the rapid tumbling

my mouth will utter

bits of jumbled tongue

and i won't know what

i am saying anymore

as the centuries rush past

ringed with corpses

and all because another

injured my pride

and all because my ego

was brushed and bruised

and who am i and who are you

on this battlefield

if i am to remain true

let me finish in beauty

my life on this planet

and let me ne'er forget

that we were one person

before we were two

conversation with my dead husband

a stream of consciousness remembrance...

there's a lot of love in there, in that big heart of yours. i don't want to let it go, i want to keep it all right here next to me on the bed to sing about when i'm dying. i want to sing about all the love i knew now and then, love for you, before you, and after you too. love when i was cracking up after we split, love when i was getting back my health after the abandonment, love when our child moves through the world without knowing what it meant. it meant everything, our marriage.

some love goes on even when two people separate after years of fighting. it goes on every time the other person walks into a room as i walked into your hospital room two years ago not knowing that i was seeing you for the very last time. there were no goodbyes, just see you soons, and though the prognosis was not good, they told me at the beginning of summer that you could live a year or more. they were wrong: a heart can give out sooner because it's invisible, no one can see what's happening on the interior. you were tired, that's for certain. no one worked harder than you did.

i don't believe in an ever-after, i believe in the now of your memory, and even if i idealize who you were, no one will ever know because you're not here to show them, not standing in front us with your redundant talk about selling stuff and getting rich or your childhood baggage or your corrosive jealousy. no, you're here as a ghost and i'm just remembering how i felt when i came home from work and you were already stirring chicken dumplings at the stove. you'd been on a tar roof in the hot sun all day and yet there you were, standing in the steam. you even went to the store first to get the ingredients. you did things like that all the time. i used to talk about equal relationships but you lived them.

remembering you is easy now and i can even allow myself to feel angry at you without any guilt. it's easier to have bad feelings about someone when they live. it takes honesty to say i'm still mad at you. and it takes even more to say that i never stopped loving you for so many years after we split and even then, i loved you as an old friend. you were the father of my child, you were the plague of my existence, you abandoned me when i was at the height of my love for you and you know what? i wasn't a saint either, i wasn't miss perfect. i was cold sometimes and tired from overwork, i was ambitious. but you loved me tirelessly until you stopped believing in my fidelty but i swear one more time to you alive and dead, I was always faithful. it had to be psychosis to make you doubt that. it had to be the terrible lack of self esteem from when you were sent away to boarding school at 4. i've thought about it until i'm dizzy with rationalizations. but it doesn't matter now. just believe me when i say i loved you and only you for all the years we lived together.

tell our son that his mother needs him. i remember how when he came to live with you when he was 10 and as he grew into a young man, you used to tell him to call his mother. he needs you to remind him again. he wants absolute freedom from some dim memory of me as a rotten mama. he never knew the back story and even when he did, he chose not to believe it. i wanted that absolute freedom once too, but now i know something about needing another person because when you get ill, you no longer have a choice: you're dependent or you die, it's that simple. well, i chose life, richard, and you did too. you chose to make your death heroic, and i was privileged to be a part of it.

please just tell him to call me. we're all we have left now that you're still dead. remind him that it wasn't all that terrible. help him remember i-hop and bowling, candyland and kung fu. help him remember blanquette of chicken and genoise cakes. help him remember massages all night long when his legs hurt. help him remember how proud he used to be of me and of us. help him trust that again.

now go on and be dead, as i'm sure you're used to it by now. we never quite arrive at the same comfort zone. no, we miss having you in the world. xoxoxoxo

cruel mistress, lazy doctors

Roberto Matta Echaurren (1911-2002)

she's back with her weaving web

into the synapses of my insula

stimulating my shrinking adrenal glands

and i can't keep up

her frenzied lightworks

assume the better part of me

as she stuffs her ever youthful hand

deep into my gray matter

this ghost of pain past and present

burns through complex networks

and all the birds stop singing

when they hear my agonizing cries

yet nothing emerges from this throat

but small yelps of helplessness

there are pills that could save me now

but my doctors won't give them to me

they cannot feel her sink into my skin

my lymph, bones and intestines

they do not have the courage to look

past the invisible into the neural

she is there in black and white

with over twenty years of scholarship

yet they will not take the time

to enter search words in a browser

and so i am left with her foot

poised ever harder on my erratic heart

as blinking lights of the autonomic

flash their warning signals

heat rises, lights go brighter

sounds swell, smells nauseate

and the pain is so great i must keep vigil

at the gates of sleep and wakefulness

narcotics will not kill her

but they diminish her all-consuming flames

they will let me wait in relative safety

until the research comes to save me

Stand now and remember

On the 10th anniversary of one such September 11th...

For all the dead of all our September 11ths,

for India, South Africa and Attica,

for Chile, Haiti, and NYC, my birthplace:

Know that our resistance shall be infinite

and the lies of the purveyors of violence

shall be lit up by sunshine glinting off our tears.

Gandhi knew that only nonviolence

and personal sacrifice could defeat

the stranglehold of the British masters.

Allende, the hope of the Chileans

knew that one day his countrymen and women

would reconstruct their own futures.

Mandela sat, studied and survived for freedom

and Aristide waited seven years in 

South Africa to return to his people.

The ghosts of the twin towers stand over us

begging more questions than answers about

how we will fashion the remainder of our years.

Each corpse in the street, each dead family

is awaiting a justice that must come and

will come when we wake up to who we are.

Those who need to massacre to keep power

to steal resources and make themselves fatter

shall find themselves at the back of the jailhouse.

People are starving for food and for love;

they are emerging from caves and snakepits

to pick up invisible arms of righteousness.

Only when we see ourselves in the other,

when we stand up for the weakest amongst us,

when we cherish and protect all our children,

will our calvacade toward September 11th stop

and each day for a moment we shall stand

and remember the end of corruption and violence.

Stand now and remember together:

Vow unto death not for revenge but for justice

and then go out and make it happen.

 8 septembre 2011

au pavillon des lauriers - bashung

An incredibly beautiful song with this amazing video by our friend, Filoutry (Fred)!




From the album "Fantaisie Militaire"

Words: Alain Bashung/Jean Fauque

Music: Alain Bashung

(as translated by Laura Tattoo)


Des toges me toisent
Men in togas sum me up
Des érudits m'abreuvent de leurs fioles
Erudites flood me with their flasks
À quoi c’est dû cette assiduité

To what is owed this assiduousness

À sillonner sans répit ma macédoine
To plow without respite my mixed vegetables
À quoi c’est dû

To what is it owed 

Au pavillon des lauriers

In the pavillion of laurels
Il est tard pour se demander
It is late to be asking oneself
À quoi c'est dû ces lauriers
To what is owed these laurels
À quoi c’est dû ces chaluts qui n’entravent que l’océan
To what is owed these trawlers that only impede the ocean 
Au pavillon des lauriers
In the pavillion of laurels
Il faut voir à ne célébrer
One must make sure to celebrate
Que l'insensé
Only the insensed  

Je veux rester fou

I want to stay crazy 

Derrière mes paupières

Behind my eyelids
Filent des régates
File the regattas
Mes années-lumière sont pas des lumières
My light years are not lights
Mais je veille
But I watch over
Sur un grain de toute beauté
A grain of complete beauty
Un grain de toute beauté
A grain of complete beauty

À quoi c’est dû
To what is it owed
Ces attributs
These attributes
À quoi c'est dû
To what is it owed
Ce duvet pachyderme
This pachydermal coverlet
Ces alizés camisolés
These camisoled trade winds
À quoi c'est dû
To what is it owed


Au pavillon des lauriers
In the pavillon of laurels
Il est tard pour se demander
It's a bit late to be asking
À quoi c'est dû ces corvées
To what is it owed these chores
À quoi c'est dû ces résidus d'amour aveugle
To what is it owed these residuals of blind love
Au pavillon des lauriers
In the pavillon of laurels
Il faut croire qu’on a savonné
One must believe to have lathered up
Liberty
Liberty
Je veux rester fou
I want to stay crazy


J'adresse aux rivières
I address the rivers
Des lettres de brume
The letters of fog
Les anniversaires j'ai l'air dans la lune
The anniversaries I have air on the moon
Mais je veille
But I watch over

Sur un grain de toute beauté

A grain of complete beauty

Un grain de toute beauté

A grain of complete beauty


À quoi c'est dû
To what is it owed
À quoi c'est dû
To what is it owed
 

je te suis

pour Zérélia 

j'aime tes mots que souvent je ne connais pas

mais tu me les enseignes avec tes visions macabres

la lune monte et sa lumière montre 

les choses qui par jour vont disparaître

les survivants qui posent dans les coins de ténèbres

attendant leurs proies dans leurs marches funèbres

leurs dernières marches comme les concélébrants

qui donnent la dernière cène à jesus christ

et voilà il n'y a plus dieu, il n'y a plus mal

il n'y a que la vie qui a faim énorme

pour la beauté de la mort, une vision céleste

de voir Morpheus descendre et mettre fin à ta peine

un sacré rêve réservé pour les adeptes

qui traversent les eaux de la rivière styx

c'est toi qui ouvres la marche et moi je vais te suivre

car de ma douleur sans fin je dois enfin enfuir