Issue 14 • Summer 2005 • Featured Lodestar Writer • Poetry
Jean Sénac,
translated from the French by Justin VicariDedication
To Pickt
Algiers, August 1967
The Stele
I've lost my reflexes, good for me;
With half-heard murmurs,
On the twenty-six wounds of my body
I erect the stele of my curse.
Come read, comrades!
Yellow-bellies, castrati from the fringes,
Sucked-off males and malignant suckers,
Carved on the obelisk of my sins!
How humid it feels, this fragrance of death --
My clouds! -- denial's orgasm
(Your furniture!) How your offspring swarm (Atomic trinkets, smoke and dust)!
Across my bag of bones foulmouthed pricks
Fresco their disorders.
Come and see, comrades, there is no myth as gorgeous among your whorish lives!
The Rope
To ambush my escapades God has placed
Adam, Jacob and Job -- and the Jewish angel
And the Arab angel. He's named me
Provocateur of fucking to make the stars
Fall one by one on the Assembly --
Burn there -- on the villas -- burn them! -- the H.L.M.
If the Chinese don't show I myself will bring
Loaves for everyone.
The apricots float back up to the surface --
Flashes of laughter! -- millionaires of the giltheads.
My rubbed flesh leaks milk.
-- Sea-urchin heart!
Ginsberg, come on, let's braid our beards as one.
Let's forge a rope of outrage against their suckers.
They are strong. Abjectly so. And handsome!
There is no soul. But there are torrents of pus on the skin
Of the sun!
Footrace
You speak of love and love. I understand nothing
But the despair of cocksuckers with only their mirrors
For escape. You speak of blond hair, civilized
Chests. I understand
Only the prick that throbs into the void, against the rocks.
Giant teenage motorbikes leave skidtracks
On my iliac. And tectonic plates
Heave up to the crust when brothels fill with shouts.
I understand
Only the sobs where flying saucers stammer.
And names: Ahmed! Mahrez! Kamel! Antar!
O fuck me in the ass! O Yousef, right up to the Koran I have sucked
Your Running. Now, on the sand
Flow back into the hourglass. You
Plummet. What ocean has taken your place?
What planet keeps your ass in pants?
The fire is invisible. You know it pulsates in the ashes of the poem. I don't understand
Anything but the despair of the prick-boomerang.
You speak to us of love, love, love like a mummy unwinding its litanies of gold,
Its plaguesores. I don't understand
Anything but the abysmal despair of cocksuckers
Cutting their losses.
Sooner the Void than the Hole,
The Void fucked by the Compact-Spiritual-Mass,
The only Now I can conceive. Passe Papa you rattle on. I understand
Only the sky and sea fucking, blue
Twins, unicorn.
Oooooo exile!
Abysmal despair right down to the Bone.
The Bar-&-Grills Are Sleeping
The bar-&-grills are sleeping. Gurgles and slogans
Keep watch
(Under pyramidal gargoyles).
Oulla! Nothing is heavier
Than your cold prick on my forehead.
We should tell the world
The Divan is on the march
And soon all the walls will be falling.
The Virgins Are Giving It Up
The virgins are giving it up to the Great Orgy of the Reeds.
Lips (wetted by death) gorged with words
They will give birth to the thousand sons of the Bastard race.
I tell you the sun will turn green
And sing through the translucent skin of their immaculate bellies
AegoO! AegoO!
AAAAAAA. . . .
Is everything truly fucked -- the administrative committees, laughter, our hard-ons?
I mean everything?
(The Chenoua is in hiding; on mainstreets the beardless carry pieces of him in their jeans.)
Death is all that's left to set life back on its feet.
Even tarted-up with dewdads
How lovely was the Revolution in her heat!
She's lost her man. She hurls herself down
Between two tuinols -- and me too.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Pricks. Cunts. I've met a lot of pricks and cunts.
Where is man?
Did the woman perish in the last blitzkriegs?
JAAAAAAAAAA. . .
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacques!
The pines and firs, the nettles undersea
Detonate their fruit. Jaaaaaaaacques!
The dream-asleep-in-the-woods is snoring. Our guitar
Lures the settlers deep into the forest. Your Volkswagen
Is not amphibian. I have loved nothing
But to wreck against the blue
BLUE space of solitude
-- O watery negation, Mother!)
From the splintered planks of my little boats
I have built the flagship.
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacques, it's going down!
BSM Pointe-Pescarde, August 23, 1967
The Raft of the Medusa
The raft of the Medusa, Venus and Mars who bawl their heads off
Just to end up mausoleumed in the Louvre!
Love in papooses, love in Papua New Guinea,
In paregoric-city, Greenwichland, dogville of scrawny palavers, turdtowns,
Slavetrade, surrender -- the man is handed over, sex and balls, Suckjob plasters over
him, pisses in his mouth, puts its feet up
In his teeth. While very faraway, between dawn and the horizon, the
Woman weeps.
(Very gently, de-venomized, complement-my-equal,
Vaginivorous man, vaginized man, has thrown you to the
Cunts.
Woman raped and scorned! All around us Suckjob bangs and steams.)
The Beautiful Brothels
Children aren't made by throwing rocks at hippies
Or calling poets dirty names.
But you have cluttered their skulls with your trash,
You have turned them into this junior riffraff wailing on my shadow.
(No cats or dogs for your Cayenne-apartments,
You've turned them into stinky knickknacks.)
God, if you exist, let us know which way your dick swings, OK?
All mankind is topsy-turvy,
Chameleon on our tree of castrationflowers.
See how man makes himself at home in his own decay and plague
(with his lil cars, his lil gadgets, his lil zinzins, his lil zazas).
See how he gnaws his neighbor's skull,
With what efficiency he plasters our bedrooms with his
Auschwitz, his Dresden, his Hiroshima, his Susini-villa.
Look, gang of cunts!
But there are no more Eyes, you don't have them,
Only sated anuses belching your glorious morality!
Anti
Gobs of glowing toxic waste because it's the only way to negate once and for all this
society so abominably cajoling.
Landfill of total negations, hatred against!
Don't be led away. Negate.
Sumptuously.
Procreator fuck, motor of perpetual abomination! Hatred and screaming bitchfests
against!
Until a new man is born.
But not from any of these cuntfactories.
The Dawns
It's about to spurt, enormous glob dangling from this cock.
Gleams a moment: and the sun pours through.
With his spurt he writes my carnivorous bliss, the first syllable of my refusal.
BSM Pointe-Pecarde, August 23, 1967
But You
But you, Jacques, you talked to me about light in words that were not a jail cell.
I come from the labyrinth dragging broken wings. Ariadne,
Those were the eons she worked and reworked in horror
Overseen by the godasses, borne along by inches on a litter of lice
Right up to Theseus' window.
O Jaaacques, with agate balls
And yesses of saeta, you wove me a raft for all of Asia.
Et voila! -- here I am
The leper, the rabid.
But scratch scratch, you tell me, like a dog.
Hidden underneath one always finds the rose.
The dogrose but the rose nonetheless!
Torrid
Make me drink the sea, make me drink
Your body on the rocks, make me
Drink the syllables that set me back upon my ankles.
I'm exhausted with words that deny
My shame....
On your whole body, in glorious floods, by the curve of
God, I come.
In the window the allspice berries chime, the garlic
Grins. Make me drink
The frozen orgeat. I sleep
Beneath your lyre. Make me drink
Until the dawn. Make me drink to the very
Bones.
Black's Black
And so I will go out dressed in frenzy (covered in feathers -- of nostalgia perhaps)
And you will kiss me in the halls, between the boulders
(Tympani of trashcans, shahnai of waves),
Then deny my face.
O streets!
Neon of cowards! Neon of crooks!
Who are you?
Yes who am I?
Who ARE WE
Who've shared nothing but shit and sperm?
And All This Skin
And all this skin whenever we seek
To claw a tunnel towards the soul!
Lust always ends in death-gasps
-- But Breath O mortals?
Parchments (my September bodies),
When pleasure makes a snack
Of space and time,
What hieroglyph do you give me to bite?
(The scent of our death whistles through the aminos.)
We're naked.
Night falls
And the sun takes back his blessings.
What confession slams the brakes on spring?
Do It Again, Jaaaa...
Jaaaaaaaaaaaacques, flagship and raft of all Asia,
I'm so lost in dreams they have the frenzy of Icarus!
This moment is fragrant with pitch!
I who loved only the sun, hurl myself to the clouds!
It isn't the Deluge that awaits me
But an angel chopped in two by my hug
Hacked apart under cinders, frozen stiff
Like the nights I call your name.
On my knees scabs (letters) form.
What plague song starts its march?
What pastel whose rumbling
Will crumble my balcony into the sea?
There's no more cure, Jacques,
Not even a shipwreck.
Amid the lies and the scandal
In spite of me, my poem tenders its page.
I wanted to invent a world
Vaster than your smile.
Look, our outpost's in ruins, Jaaacques!
And on my palms (this is the hideous part) the sun, the earth are still breathing.
One Last Dream, Margot, Before Dying
But Antar is coming. I always said
He would seep from my wounds like a white flag without an emblem
When a strong enough wind made my body
The Red Sea.
Wind of Elsewhere or wind of Roots?
Oh may it split the poem in two!
Antar will be born. No need for his mouth to invade me I love you.
Nothing will remain of crime or the night.
Hyperprism BSM
Nothing but you sun
The planet inside
My devil-may-care father who pumped me full of his kinkiness
Mud
To prickly-web my vertebrae
Passport to the night
Raft-bereft Medusa
Memory between two sexes
Toward a possible Mediterranean
A possible Body
Sun clutched more fleetingly
Than a drop of sperm on my handkerchief
End Notes
"But You," "And All This Skin," and "Do It Again, Jaaaaa...." originally appeared in Buckle &.
"Torrid" originally appeared in Visions International.
Table of Contents: The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm
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Jean Sénac was a teacher, soldier, and writer. He was the author of numerous collections of poems, including Citoyens de beauté and Jubilation, and one novel, Ébauche du père: pour en finir avec l'enfance. Following the Algerian revolution, he worked in the Ministry of Education in Algeria and for Radio-Algiers with a daily program, Poésie sur tous les fronts. He was the founder of the magazines Soleil, Terrasses, and cofounder of Galery 54. He was murdered, possibly because of his political beliefs, in August 1973 in Algiers. More information (in French): French Wikipedia: Jean Sénac.
Justin Vicari's work appears or is forthcoming in Interim, Rhino, Eclipse, Slant, Spillway, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Poetry Motel, Third Coast, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Softblow, and other reviews. He is the author of chapbooks "In a Garden of Eden" (Plan B Press) and "Woman Bathing Light to Dark" (forthcoming from Toad Press, 2006). In 2005, one of his poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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