10,000 POEMS – Posted freshly most days
Watch his eyebrow rise
See its thick arc
He affects such
when reading French
[Monsieur est un crétin]
He will take longer
to delay our waiter
it is his petit way
of being quite superior
[Ma vie est trop courte]
But – I agree with my dog –
My life is too short
for such bullshit
Please order – now
Inhale those odours within
la Ville Lumière – of corpse wax
found among her exhumed
Draw on le cimetière des Innocents
An old miasma off rotting flesh
lingers in time’s stillness
above French Empires of Death
atop her levelling grounds
Citizens sought
salubrious solutions
as well as judicial balance
by opening wide old books
by breaking cracking spines
glued by their learned dead writers
Thinkers took routes dug through
others – now equal – as bones
Inert citizens will never stop
troubling the living of Paris
Here Ho Chi Minh – under
his pseudonym of Thàn –
served travellers’ pastries
on a French ship routed
from Newhaven’s docks
His silver service ways
and polished tableware
have been long-buried
under that now piled skyline
of scrap metal and waste
Still a French ferry – but today
slipping out to diesel rumbles –
with beer-plied pleasure seekers –
holidaymakers – and
a deck of saturnine truckers
In this light a ghost-white hull –
Turner’s Fighting Temeraire –
awaits clearance to enter
and roll her weak bow wave
through her last high tide
But she is no more than a fret
breathed out by those who lust
for lost British sea power
This slumped harbour reeks
of sun-dried fishing nets
Below its fort’s high facade
Newhaven’s battalion collapsed –
West Beach fell to le Tricolore
Sussex were druv when a strip
of her sand was lost to France
It would be easy to follow steps
and reach an edge of this island
but stupor and heat keep me seated
Rust is pre-eminent in Newhaven
There is no revolutionary cure
Paul Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne
was coded – still popular poetry –
to give notice –
his long sobs of French-sung violins
declared an Allied invasion
to those listening
Whilst she never understood speeches
of love – and our common
mistakes –
I would rarely read to her – she rarely read
my mutterings – my weight-pared
compositions
She never understood what was being said
She found poetry too difficult
Her own résistance
E080919
Their Lady of Paris burnt
in one online afternoon
Her re-imagined spire
tipped to robes of smoke
like a bloodied lance
in surrender – once more –
to politics and holy battles
in a kindless fog of war
Her heated metals ran
as dark beaded sweats
from her swealing heights
to leave cooled scabs
of Saint Thomas – and others –
spattered across worn stones
under her collapsed transept
Those slabs will be saved
with high relics – rescued
from clouds above la quatrième
No puzzle of scattered ashes –
France has her couronne d’épines
Vous,
petite douce chose,
doit voyager,
doit visiter,
pour une journée,
une dernière fois:
Une dernière requête
traduit comme décès:
Pas plus de nourriture,
pas plus de boissons,
maintenant le temps
s’est écoulé:
Ces luxes égoïstes,
une telle prière,
cette demande:
À tout moment de la vie,
il est temps de vivre.
Cher Steve Bannon,
Comment redémarrer le mal?
Vous l’avez trop facile
mon altesse-droite,
vous avez votre chemin,
avec la haine, votre haine,
votre politique de quatre lettres:
Tenez leurs têtes courbées,
prendre leurs cœurs sombres,
et ensuite nourrir, si longtemps,
sur leurs intestins bouillonnés,
assaisonné de toss-politique,
raisonnement c’est tout pour eux.
Là, mon cruel ami,
est votre projet déplié
à construire avec l’iniquité.
Cordialement,
Mike Bell.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 