lystn

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

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman