The Forgotten Madmen of Ménilmontant by Frank Stanford

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman   The Forgotten Madmen of Ménilmontant after Jacques Prévert   Do not look sadly at days gone by days below days like a river running under the stars Do not listen to the blues or speak often with priests Do not think the rich women enrolled in the college of nightfall will always smell the same way   Everytime the tree works the leaves dream   Everytime I carve the dead wing my name in the dark lamp of the outhouse I said everytime I cut my name in the old wood rotten as a tugboat I know I am always with you   Everytime the schoolboy’s bad moon dowses blood from the virgin’s stone thighs I know I am handsome and young and drunk eternal as a weed   It will not smell the same Everytime I open a bottle of wine and see a snake doctor under my bed I know there is something coming and eternal like taking off a white coat over the body of the dead   Poets have done this before Poets have made love and gathered at the cheap joints they’ve cut their fingers toasting one another’s death   Poets have made love and remained thick they’ve gotten cold feet at the crucial moments when left alone with the students with sad eyes   Do not die in the wintertime for there is no okra or sailboats   It will not smell the same that twig of blood or the chiffonier   Do not listen to hunting dogs in autumn or tie yellow flies for the small lips of desperate friends   Poets have done this before and they’ve wandered off alone and unheard of to bury the caul of their own stillborn   Like a voice the odor has changed   Dust under the hooves of a horse running side by side with the fog a book in the hands of a fool   Cheese and fish and spinsters are the body of the poet for the poet does not eat black bread he gives it to the poor   Everytime a mare throws a foal in an exile’s country I know I am with you a gun in the hand of a fool   The poet forgets in remembrance of you he is the lunatic’s left hand man on Sundays the acolyte of the moon he is night following other nights the eyes of the blind the stranger your wife leaves with when you’re still talking with your youth stowed away on the ship of death and it will not smell the same   Everytime I see a young man tuck his knife back in his vest I want to say forget it and drink  

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