Upcoming:
The Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, with the Métamorphoses Association, Bretteville-sur-Odon, 2027.
Abysses, group exhibition with the Dire Autrement collective, La Bouée, Cherbourg, 2027.
poetic, textual and sound experiments
Between sound poetry and theatre, all is poetry summed up the poet Jean Cocteau by adding the suffix poetry to all the arts and to life.
To discover more or in other forms (eternal tea time), to clickhere.
Contempt
The price I put on you, your worth, your scent. Enamoured of you. You are worth a thousand camels, their land, the water they drink, the water that quenches your thirst. Lift my weight. Quench me in one of your kisses. I love you, my friend, that is how it is, I cannot help it; I cannot suppress this burning tenderness that I feel for you. You put me to the test. I test-tube. You experiment. We Hiroshima. “I” no longer wants to play with “you”. Put it off until tomorrow. Clumsy. Carry it into tomorrow… deport it along the quays. Heavy. Heavy. Without handing it back with both hands. Two hands clasping mine. Very tightly. Very tightly. Never forget. Never tenderness or hourglass. Time erases memories like sand, memories carved into sand. I will throw you into the waters of oblivion. The stagnant river will swallow you as it devoured my other lovers. And sometimes, traces rising from nowhere. Things forgotten that resurface in the river of my thoughts. A desire for you, hatred for him, indifference for the other. But who are they? “I” does not remember. “I” no longer wants to know. “I” is a river that flows and forgets itself. You float inside it like a dead fish, killed by the poison of my will. “I” no longer knows you. “I” has forgotten you. “I” no longer sees you along its paths. “You” has disappeared. “You” has been erased. Sucked away by the snakes of the sands. Snakes that descend and rise through time, indecently… Snakes that spread through you, through me, through us, through him… Liquid snakes that flow, flooding the earth with dead skins. The dead skins of forgetting you. The earth is slowly covered with the corpses of us. She sheds us. She, multi-layered, multi-skinned, standing upright. She, multiple you. Each facet is a painting of you. Each mirror, your reflection. Each river, your blood flowing through your veins. You live the Earth. You live, the river. You bleed, the world. Your laughter, the storms. Your sigh, a hurricane. Your desires, chaos. Farewell to the world, to the irises. Goddess of yourself, crowning yourself with irises upon a mountain of stone. Dare, iris!
The Big Questions
— …And what is it about? *** — Love! What else would you have it be about? When we are not talking about love, we are only talking about hate, which, relatively speaking, amounts to much the same thing. Love for another, love for parents, for children, war, jealousy, all of that is love! And that is all we ever talk about. Even if we wanted to talk about indifference, there would be nothing to say; indifference is the “no man’s land”, the border between love and hate, and there is nothing there but the in-between, which is to say, not very much, so silence reigns supreme in the midst of indifference, and we fall silent.
Omelette and peaceful
I am a beauty offered to a deserted island. Will you be upon it? Are you my island? Are you the complement of the wing that forms the third person? My island and my wing are one and the same. My island is deserted and waits for an angel to pass by. Angel-egg. Would you be passing through? A floating island made from the eggs of my angel. Two eggs at the bottom of a frying pan, two islands of yellow sand and white foam. Islands that ooze when you pierce them. They burst when you make them ooze. We disgust them too. Islands, no longer have any flavour. Islands, are no longer exotic; I already know you by heart, my island. For a long time I explored you. I know every grain of your sand, every plant of your earth. I know the birds that sing in your branches. I know you, my wing; I have often flown away with you. Often I have flown away from my island with you.
The last meeting
**Tone upon you without tone,** without measure, without tonality, I am an immense and muffled sound, a tearing apart in space… I am an act of pleasure and suffering, in under-France, I evaporate into sulphur. In the catacombs of your minds, I wander like a soul without sorrow, I am not afraid, I no longer frighten, I am nothing anymore, I am no more… even nothingness has fled from me. I disappear little by little, absorbed by chaos, “I” no longer exists. ***** I have neither roofs nor army anymore… I am unconquered, an Alexander of papier-mâché, a Caesar of bronze, a tyrant of trinkets. Nothing fears me anymore, only the image that still sometimes remains in my mirror can still frighten me, without ever clearing a path for me to the other side. I am condemned. I am the path that a condemned man, himself, the soul that preceded him, traced before him. An infernal path without lights, traced in blood and bones; gently, very gently, too gently, all the way to torture. Until then, the torment endures. Ultimate twisting of the last crumbs of the soul, which disfigures the face, like a scream, an insane excess, an octave into infinity. August rupture that, with a stroke of the sword, transcends body and spirit as though they were nothing more than a simple sheet of paper. While a flame sets about licking the last scraps of the bloodstained sheet… ***** Gloved incense. Screaming glottis. Screaming oak of the cries of emasculated men… dipped in lime as one would dip them in tea. Immense slaughter of being against its reflection, it believes it is itself, it is nothing but its illusion. And all the while, it kills, it gnaws, it pillages, it feeds upon the cries and the pain it believes it can no longer feel, playing, as with a bag, with the last lovers’ rendezvous, the final rendezvous of “amor”… the one that loves even the heartless.
the way to you
**What is love?** We walk along the same path, We eat from the same plates, We share the same bed, We know, through both strength and tenderness, the secrets of each other’s bodies, But above all, it seems to me, every time we see each other we burn with the same wonder as in that first moment, We see ourselves as imperfect mirrors of one another, And it is because the reflection is beautiful, not quite smooth and perfectly polished, That we never tire of looking at it as though for the first time. I gave you my body as though it were the first time, Each one before you was a first time, And each one before you was one step closer to you, Each time an attempt to admire the mirror that you are, until I could find you. And yet, perhaps you too are nothing more than the rough outline of a mirror, How could I know? The mirror is so blurred. And yet, if ever it were polished like those one can see today, I would be afraid and I would run away… But your reflection is so confused, so much like a mist, and yet I find myself in your eyes… Though they are not the same colour as mine, They look in the same direction. Thus our two reflections face one another even as they turn towards the same direction. And yet we are not two virgins born in the instant of meeting, A sculptor with deceitful hands has already worked upon us, Mixing us again with other clays, assembling us and taking us apart, In his invisible eyes we are nothing but rough drafts. Love is nothing where you are too much. Love is nothing but a lie, You, you are my illusion; And I like to believe in you, to believe you, As a man believes in a god. I know you to be so immaterial, at once made of flesh and blood, While my mind cannot help interpreting, with misplaced zeal, the echo of your reflection. Love is only an illusion, you are very real, but I see you as love; I see you, illusion. You are, while you are not for me… And so I must travel through other territories of yourself in order to believe in you or see you. I set out like a nomad into your Sahara, thirsting to drink you, Believing in all your mirages and your oases… Colliding with your desire, the stars of your tenderness, The dunes of your gentleness, the wreckage of your life before, and of the lives yet to come… Other aviators have explored you before me; others will do so after me. Your sand is warm beneath my feet, So gentle that I would burn my feet in it without even noticing. So soft that I will awaken from crossing you as though from the sweetest of dreams, Those that turn a whole day into a little paradise; So sweet that my life will be all the better for it, without a jolt. Then, little by little, oblivion will settle into my life, erase this sweet dream and probably replace it with another. That is how it is, you know, and you will fade away, my reflection; you too will lose yourself in the abysses of another reflection. That is how it is. We are not sad; we already know. And we will run, driven by the same inexhaustible desire, towards these new lost illusions, as untouched and happy as fresh clay. We will let our illusions evaporate into the mist, surrender themselves to chaos, as they were always destined to do.
Desire
**Desire. Desire. Desire.** Illusion of desire. Certainty of illusion… turn, turn and capsize… carry away the last surges of certainty. Body in flames. Fallow head upon a carousel to the sound of a sonata for violin and cello by Ravel… Last memory at the edge of a cliff, sharpened like lace. Did you know that lace appeared in the Middle Ages, when long sleeves were adorned with teeth increasingly fine, increasingly elaborate… more and more **dentelated**… like mouths, like smiles… Immense mouths at the end of a garment. Two kisses at once… two spider kisses… Art once reigned… art flows like time, but that was once… art ray upon image… superimposition of the never-seen. Strange thing that repeats itself in the unique.
Chimera
At seventeen, the age of poets, the mountains are mad and the clouds are wild, the flowers speak a language that makes hearts weep, and fools sneeze. Oh, you said this hour as one says nine o’clock at dinner. A brand-new hour, just before ten. You have seventeen hours, I heard it from your lips. I heard time emerge from between your lips. And I kissed time by loving you, so my love for you makes me fear our final hours a little less. In the glow of our hearts, I would see a new morning rise. And the papier-mâché chimera will take flight, leaving a melodious echo in its wake. Hateful mother-hound, you will pay for it to the gods, and your wings will crumple, and my love will grow even when you have devoured me. I would not know the riddle, since you are the one who dictates it, but I would know how to answer it. I would no longer know your lioness's body, your falcon's wings and your serpent's tail, I would not even see the apple you hold out to me. I would no longer know how to be tempted by your flesh, I would be nothing but love for you, I would know nothing but how to love you, and I would bite into your paper silhouette. And you would disappear, burned away by my saliva. And when I then licked my fingers, you would look down at me from atop an invisible rock, my flesh, my tender and gentle one, …my dearly beloved chimera.
A theater at our fish-bodies
Come and rest for an afternoon in the shade of summer. We will go swimming in glimmers of hope. We will taste all these tall grasses that smell so sweetly of nostalgia. But not too much, for they are poison. And it is you I want as my poison, my beloved, Neither past nor future, only the present of us. Let it be you who kills me, slowly — like foxfire. Together, let us be our own death, For such is the way of those who choose it: let it have your face, let it be you. I choose you for my death, my beloved; I choose you for my past, I choose you for my future. And above all, I choose you now. Fish me, let us fish each other, together let us be the pois(s)ons of evil. For from all our scales, a rainbow of happiness, evil shall become our good. And in my blood, I want our fish to float, a teeming living pool, When the tree is dry, may it make life catch its breath again… Upon the boat of life, may our blood ring out. A sweet, melodious memory of our two bodies that loved one another… They must, as in the theatre, make their entrance, then depart, making room For others than us. Born from us.
"You" no longer exist
**“You” no longer exists** I am the troubadour of desire. My muse amuses me, like a firebird settling into your hollow— the orbital hollow, the hollow of the belly, the hollow of the heart. Embroidery upon the skin, a constellation of brown seeds, linen at the nape of your neck, linen upon your hips, linen upon your cheeks, linen wrapping us through the night. Wheat upon your branch-like arms, wheat upon your thighs, wheat in the hollow of your thighs, there beneath the iliac bones, the island of wonders. He marvels. The cordial drum pulses. Everything within him begins to swell: the body, desire, feelings. A ladder is needed for Aeschylus. He is a hill of crumbs gnawed by ants. He is an infinite Escher drawing. She is a staircase without a landing. She is milk, he is beauty. He is dark, she is (his) shadow. They fade, they lose their way, they begin again. Again and again, he travels the staircase, she circles the ants. He falls, she becomes stone. She, a jewel, a diadem and sapphire. He, Sappho and Socrates. Knowledge no longer interests them. Nor does being. You will no longer see them. They are in a vast meadow, lost and entwined.
Our mouths are a black hole
**My mouth** You, chin Us, passionate kiss Emboldened by the tenacity Of what burns inside us I am a mountain, you are a skyscraper I am a cathedral, you are a cathedra I am the Grail, you are the blood of the Cross I am without gods or faith, I am desire for you For a fraction of an instant We are All the myths of all time Selfish, selfish I am a “kill for you” You are a game to me And in this fraction of a second We are, to one another, Nothing but us, without you or me Nothing feminine, nothing masculine Nothing thought, nothing desire Only this immense temporal abyss This immense vortex born from our desire A black hole that draws everything into its wake Our bodies and time Life and the instant I drew you in through my mouth While you made me disappear¹ through yours In that same instant One might have said Our mouths are a black hole And words do not exist ¹ I do not want a fairy in this story. I do not want a full stop either. Only words are impervious to the black hole. Words do not exist. You cannot make disappear something that does not exist.