Two Poems by Ivan de Monbrison

 

The snake man

 

Dream nightmare light think not to know not to be  don’t want to think don't know don't be don't want to think severed sex severed hand over there far away on the hills we've set pyres on fire we've let the pyres burn there we've put corpses there is no centre tomorrow you will go to look for bouquets of severed heads in the gardens in the cemeteries you will have eaten your father's corpse you will go to rape your mother then rape your son you will go to rape your shadow you will go to rape your past will rape your future and yet you are sexless you know you are dead you are without anus you are nothing you are less than the worst man on earth and it suits you you like being nothing as being nothing you manage to get away from the others you escape the world be nothing and maybe one day to go hide in the forest at each branch of all the trees there is a severed head screaming there is a corpse that cries there is my mother who’s wandering on a road she doesn't know where she's going she's going to her own grave and I can't do anything for her soon she will be dead not knowing who she had been during all of her life  anyway one never knows who one is I don't know who you are I don't know who the fuck I am how long the road  has been today I have walked so much and my legs hurt I would like to drop to the ground I would like to be able to pray but I don't even have the strength to pray anymore and anyway there is no nothing to pray about there are charred pieces of meat in the pyres on the hills I go up to one of these pyres I eat some meat because I haven't eaten in a long time and even being vegetarian I have the need to feed myself someone has left a book on the floor in the street this book is Marguerite de la nuit by Pierre Mac-Orlan I open it I skim the pages but my eyes can't attach themselves to the words the words are far from my eyes far from my heart there is a prayer that should be said but not a Christian prayer a prayer made up from scratches I would not have should have been born in this country this country is not made for me this language is not made for me I should have been born a shaman elsewhere have a very short life end up dying sick and young and that would have been so easy to die like a snake in a river a snake swimming on the surface of the river a constrictor snake of course there were the crocodile men they cut their skins with sharp shells they put some kind of blue dye on it and their bodies were covered with scars blue like the scales of crocodiles I think there were tree men too it was good that way you have to know how to refuse the world the world this beheaded world withoubeheade they make us accept their hollow world for ourselves and force it on their own children and that is useless.

The Target

 

The passing of time has nothing in common with the weather it is raining dawn is not yet born and yet we have folded the page of night into four indeed we have folded it into four with the dreams written inside as if to erase them we went out naked in the street in the middle of the night we looked naked at the stars the sky the earth we thought about an animal that had died we thought about it so hard that we wanted to die in our turn then you go and open a door on the other side there is a staircase that goes down you walk down it there you find yourself in hell there are all the human beings you have known because only hell exists in reality no one can redeem oneself the human being when it dies is put underground and remains underground here is the explanation they are neither unhappy nor happy there they do not suffer in hell and the devil does not live in hell the devil lives on earth he is inside all of us you walked naked in the street for a long time you looked at the lit windows and the people in their apartments watching television and the people in their apartments watching madness madness it’s those images that don’t exist that enter their brains and make up the bulk of their lives madness is the weight so light of the night on my bare shoulders at night when I go naked in the street I no longer have a sex I no longer have a name I no longer have a family I am an animal I could almost walk on all fours legs if it were for a malformation due to the evolution of my specie which forces me to walk upright in an abnormal way I exceeded my life expectancy I exceeded the life expectancy of forty years which is the normal life expectancy of a human being in nature I have in my turn become a monster a monster whose body is gradually falling apart and that medicine is fixing day after day all of us are monsters I go back to bed the bed is cold outside the night is not dark because of the city lights of the lights produced by nuclear power plants all those nuclear power plants that function with the fracture of matter the fracture of an atom and if you fracture reality this reality explodes and releases a fantastic energy this energy floods the city with light and heat and that these old degenerate animals that are human beings need to live in their holes in their lighted holes because human beings are not meant to live at night in their heated holes because human beings have no fur left on them by now there is just between me and the moment of my death the time needed for an arrow shot  from a bow by an hollow rich man to spend his free time my life is just the time that this arrow will take to hit its target and once the arrow is stuck in the target everything will be terminated for me in an everlasting process because of that human-monster trying to kill an innocent deer in a forest in Connecticut for no reason at the far end of the earth where civilization ends.

Ivan de Monbrison is a poet and artist born in 1969 in Paris. He has been published in literary magazines globally.