for Denis Roche       

And who down there is raising their voice if not our very era
itself? Disintegrating the hardened star,
innately poised though cold as ice inside my pupil
oozing from the well reeking of my ideology oozing
with the blood that slays that age-old suicidal inside of me.

Not this steep ridge nor thunderclap
nor gunpowder nor torrential
solar flares of Sicarii flooding my paguroidea-like eyes
slaying the age-old reverie welling inside me vomited
into sparks smeared against
this amulet serving as my very own sarcophagus?

God goes missing, dismissing the square through which
this odd tomb goes wandering, still yet a child,
an adult sutured together from the skin of jellyfish,
flees the advances of the coffin hauled in by that sea,
pledging loyalty to nothing, foam oozing from
this face of mine which is nothing if not volcanic this face of mine.

He came from the very heart of stars, rosy lights ripened for the eclipse, transforming himself into a clown, a serpent, a resinous sack of wine; he went on such a rampage that the walls surrounding him rose to restrain his understanding. Never  were stinkbugs more well suited to this world! Here, some quarreling Bedouins. There, a godsend, or some explosion in the rockface, giving the resourceful  source of the spring free rein, and by whose reins I bridle the world: soiled rags, tattered waste, rocket artillery, bloody stampedes, and the lushest ossuaries.

*

At my feet, the convulsions of the world: everything goes to waste, yes, everything goes to shit. What are you talking about, loudmouth? Here comes a certain someone willing to nibble his icterus down to nothing. And another who corrupts my flesh. He has fallen asleep under the gently yellowing moonlight. His wineskin overflowing with mother’s milk. And who is this over here, why it’s the old wretch himself, seated upon his ascending peak of decapitated skulls. His head smelting the errant ammunition. A shooting star of a child, nearly as old as you, is taunting the dog; the sea below is breaking against the rocks, ushered into our whereabouts is every praying mantis grinding this country into dust. Aïss, otherwise known as the Amazigh man, who journeyed to the very ends of Time. But the old wretch strikes him with his whip of woven-together asps. I draw my laughter back and leave.

*

Every mountain takes root in your eye, repeats the Amazigh man, who journeyed around the sun. The old Master of the Apocalypse is there, by his side; together they walk the world’s slag revealed before you. But they hate you, they won’t wait for you. Your birth was their death sentence. Look, there they are now, watching the sky. Keeping an eye on anything that might take wing. The green of the sky is continuous; nothing happens that hasn’t already. Not a bird above them. Nor in the valley. Everything grows so violently illuminated that the old man takes shelter from the light, everything is so totally devoid of life that the Amazigh man, he who made the sun spin around the earth with his turban alone, tries, in vain, to cling to the visions of misery that pierce his soul. But nothing comes from the sky, not one raincloud, not one wisp. The world has not yet begun to whisper. No more than a silhouette, the old man and the musician set out to circulate the trace remains of mountain.

*

Is this still a dream, really… or merely what we’ve come to recognize as fantasy? Am I lying in the rain, a stray molecule of flame… or merely cradled by the sonorous waves? Whatever the case may be, I am walking. We overshadow and still we rediscover one another, one after the other, like the waves of a speech sent across the airway, ages ago. This is the life of stone, the memory decomposing. Perhaps an act of aggression inflicted upon the bedrock.

*

No season made calligraphy of those traces known as desert. And first of all, is the desert here something other than driven-out intelligence? The execution of nameless conspirators, resentment and hostility blooming from the bones, shifty-eyed assassins and scorched walls: all the old wretch can see when he deigns abandon his mount. That which does not yet exist will seem unbearable to your eyes. Nothing will remain but resignation, blood and tears wrapped in razor-wire. And you will cry out in despair for a little air, a pitcher of water, a handful of toasted seed. You will see nothing but hatred, you will writhe in the net of fear, interspersed with constellations of wafting horrors. The clamor will have faded away, the light itself extinguished. You will have to dig your way out from the sediment again, compromise yourself once again. To divest yourself of all that will follow. But you will have understood what veritable portals of chaos these torments give way to.

*

Hubris coronated as public utility, that pride festering in the nose, shame transformed into farce, spinelessness, and contempt for the people: these are his greatest attributes. He is nothing more than a venerated phantom, quickly forgotten by the dogs, yapping as he passes by. One empty void for the night to seal shut, one eye squashed against a Southern boulder. The dusty trails, the ballets, the bouquets of sand, the wind, the ocean with its exhausted voice, the lion extinguished by the silence, the shepherd who dies of thirst while dams are ushered in, the coveted young lady swept away from her fiancé by an obscure fonctionnaire, ravished, bloody, but diaphanous in the lasciviousness of her evening dress, the songstresses of Khenifra and Tiznit, the pebbles down in the Souss-Massa wadi, every city, every tribe, bears witness to his death. Struck dumb by the sun, he trembles: every fall from grace rushing back, every assassination brought back to memory; he is brought to the very brink of death without entirely dying; unsupported, alone; the inalienable wretch, repudiated by the heavens, by the earth, spinning around as if uprooted from the blood, from the flesh, from the words transformed into crimes.

*

His offspring strangles death in this cathedral, listens, seated among the legionnaires, the murderers, to the verb smashed to pieces down through the age in which Jesus lived, crucified, humiliated, reacquainted with disorientation, not yet well articulated, the key-to-the-vault-of-the-verb, the golden coin, the music tangled up into deleterious smoke-rings, into odious acres of prisons and asylums, into brass beaten over and over again against the backs and the protuberances of the people. He is asleep, yes… or else surreptitiously passing from one death to another, spiraling into self-pity, his lonesome shadow exhibiting its petrifying nature, in secret.

*

The great tenor bell, worn down by centuries of wailing, by the dried-up flowers and those yet to come, by the steles buried in the dust, by the hands of priests who no longer exist but in memory, the great tenor bell prophesizes and petrifies the dignitaries from within, from within the laughter of the dead. But the offspring, his offspring, sees only a pesky insect where the music is, a mosquito plastered across a fogged-up window, cast out by the warm night, its wings crinkled and its body squashed, all too present. It drones inside his head, saunters up his nose, the great tenor bell. “That’s no pond! I’m nowhere near the water, though clearly I’m full of it, but it’s you, desert, you, who want to swallow me.”

*

The springtime barely crosses his mind under this vault of roots loomed around some very bizarre dream. Acidic crown, poison, mortal mushroom, nothing escapes the sharpness of his claw. He is the innermost atom and the sap’s espionage. Should he disintegrate while his eyes are busy nailing us to the heavens, it’s all the better to establish his power. He is the withered twig and log, burning on the hearth of the poor, the bitter tisane of the Targui and the one hundred cracks of the whip doled out across the back of the slave. He has neither court nor kingdom, merely a desire that erases him as soon as his delusion comes to fruition.

*

The people is laid out over a ragged mat,
hammering its head with its fists,
guzzling its pus, digging its teeth into its own gangrenous body…
Out in the square, leading out into the ocean, an old wretch
recites the antiquated chevauchée into the wind,
he bleeds himself with a dagger
and displays the scars of his torture…
This people laughs, showering him in shriveled skin.

*

Says the old Master of the Apocalypse: “Today, the fishermen have brought nothing back from the sea, save one malformed head, eaten away by the fish. The sea, like the sky, no longer satiates our hunger. Shall we not, my brethren, sacrifice our lives to one another, shall we not return to anthropophagy?” Says the old wretch: “The sea shall bear witness to the death of man! No need to lament the fate of your belly!” Says the old Master of the Apocalypse: “The death of man shall not come to pass! The head that the fishermen have brought back is no human head, as you will come to see, it comes from another universe altogether.”

*

The women who revel in your nights, the elves but will-o’-the-wisps, or tesserae, genitalia split straight down the middle and firing inside your neurons, the irresistible lips that seize you in your sleep, the low and heavy foliage that blocks your path, the looming walls, the sky and the stones of the ever-nascent river, of the torrent, of every torrent you wade through, joyfully, the most trivial wisp of thistle, the beautiful swallows nestling into the eyes of your mother, into the cornices of your house, or the satiated wrath of your father, the beautiful lady that only once in every while you’re able to catch the smallest glimpse of, while on her way out to draw a jug of water from the well, the dead girl who fell into that same well at the onset of twilight, whom everyone wept for, whom you loved without realizing; her grave, the women, the olive and palm trees uprooted by the whirlwinds, the maelstroms out in the distance, on their way toward the dried-up mountains, the color of burnt-sienna, the impossible impasse, the old South…

*

Child, how fond you grew of the streams through which the trash would flourish, through which you would inhale the odors of ammonia; how you would watch the sun, all those sprouts, all those ditches, there, where the city would give way to the shanty towns recycled from wooden crates, where you would come across some playthings: several fish in a pond, piddles of water, a rusty umbrella… or the bosom of some old lady who would leap up and scream at you whenever you plopped yourself down upon her lap. The trains came and went as you looked on, like the waves of the ocean… or those deep trenches cut into the outskirts of the city. Your eyes, yes, it was your eyes that were the real trenches. An easily-obtainable death. You were afraid of it; though you yearned for it. You loved the pergola, the little cabaret-restaurant, the tower that the water would splash against, softly, the silent wave; you were so in love with the destruction toward which others were prone. And that cigar, that fat cigar that you were offered in that tower, above the corpses and the gas dissipating all around you? You were nothing more, truly nothing, you old wretch! The black quarries where your fantasies would give way to the doghouses forcefully pried from the hands of degraded families… The ocean, there, under your feet, where those who could no longer cough up enough to meet the lifeguard’s demands, would lay down their lives… hauled away, vomiting, restoring the stores of their dreams.

*

Underneath the olive tree, death dreams up its smile for you,
the springtime passes, summer arrives, the sky drowns
itself in the widowers’ blazing kohl.
Sepulcher— swing open the forbidden portals of blood—

                                                Casablanca / Palavas-les-Flots / Paris
                                                                   1964/1974