Thursday, 11 June 2026

Five Poems by Olchar E. Lindsann - Including One Translation from French - English

 






Hidden Earth Face

 

slap shot mannikin mashup face

slash Soudden Hurrican’t art

iculate ontologic p’raiseup penned

in predawn crackdown ten’ebrous

shrapnel flashsprout fisherrip up

wrestless raidon poise on floodp’lain

out iced morgue tongue lipping up

that ice-king’s laps hot spurts in jets

spits’perm o’frost o’er Severin’ Macaw

s’trides raw thru skull dust chips

rips empath Thunder jugular’s Bolt

for cover kick in kid nabbed tendon-ball.



Granite, then of Moss

       ~~†~~>>>::◊::<<<~~†~~

            “ripening all the while”

       –Paschal Beverly Randolph,

        Dealings with the Dead (1862)

       ~~†~~>>>::◊::<<<~~†~~

                  >>>::◊::<<<

And so I ran the tariff gamut, every

new condition being more and ever

favourable, amphibious, brought out new

raw properties from within me, and new

        beauties to the salt in

a sun’s sear eye. I was still such in drafted, in

revision one might be of imperial permafrost, is

of no account, ––only states. Something taps me

    that I should slice in every thin cold

    cut that ever I felt, monad detained

though I was logging hours, the song was

barricade was germ was destined to

throw off any large-language-model form



myself upon dead-line

 

     As I nestled

icepick flotillas, slept.

If she would never talk

of petting crimes,

pressure of grief would

allow seldom data

     to flow, for

central nervous cycles

over-burdened heart

burnup boingo necktie

     and well up, o

slop shop committee

whom I loved so well.

     √√√√√√√√√√

“t, for the tear foun

  tain seldom thaws”

   – Paschal Beverly

 Randolph, Ravelette.

     √√√√√√√√√√

bystanding mourners

countdown hotrod, publish

“Never more,” and a

tendril batter cancelled

til tears refused

entire floor units:

     poor heart

for talking parts

I could weep now

ascend while gasping

floods still gather

spirit legions, spirit

strings snap and crack.



Los Hymn VIII

 

beyonder furnaces : warforge;mortar

laid adamic bomb : raw’ogre;mordor

nervetrenchWork: flawgr; Orc’force

     sanker generoil tanker

     con’spireacy of contrAries

fallin Albion hacked into sons

     Hand>>sunscreedn<<Koban

        daughters into song Albion

     Hyle)))mooarnèd(((Skofield

          found all’beio’nation

in warmiidst b’ask the strikill dr’one

     tomb’é of visionArieswarms

intuernmeant’s craven craidle hill, come

     matter’s mundust cavern Phandtoms

de chaoslayage fourfolded gates

de hateslough make y’our silop realm

          ::Go!GoNoOzÂ::

     Dleifoks(((à pox=>vala)))Elyh

        sTones into lumen’s Loscity

     Nabok<<vegeteleology>>Dnah

commundus midtst sordid wastes



Translation from the French:

 

                 the elephants

          by Leconte de Lisle, 1862

like an ocean sans edge lies the ebony red,
and which blazes, quite hushed, full crumbled in its bed.
an immobile undulation now overspreads
the horizon of copper gas where mankind’s bred.

voided life and void noise. all the satiate lions
lie asleep in deep lairs a hundred miles on,
and giraffes sate their thirst on the fountains of cyan,
way down, beneath the date-palms panthers love to lie on.

not one bird passes by while its wing flagellates
viscous air, where a sun enormous circulates.
there some boa betimes, who while dozing’s been baked,
makes its backbone’s glistering scale-flakes undulate.

thus beneath the fair heavens burns smouldering space.
but, while all in dolorous deserts lie slumbering,
the elephants rugged, rovers slow lumbering
to the realm of their birth have humped across the wastes.

from a speck on the skyline, like a brown in mass,
they draw nigh, upsetting powder, and one detects,
so as not to digress from the track most direct,
how beneath vast sure legs distant sand-dunes collapse.

he at the head is a chieftain of old. his frame
is as chapped as a trunk which time gnaws at and mines;
his head is like a stone, and the arch of his spine
hurdles mightily on with negligible strain.

never slacking his pace nor yet pressing his march,
he leads to their coda ordained his powdered peers;
and, while gouging a sandy trench out in their rear,
the gargantuan pilgrims trail their patriarch.

with their ear-folds outfanned, with trunk tucked between tusks,
they shuffle, eyes shut. beating and steaming’s each gut,
and their sweat in flaring air as clouds rising up;
and all round them a thousand zealous insects buzz.

but what signify thirst and the ravenous flies,
and the sun that is crushing their black pleated back?
they dream while they trudge of the disavowed lands,
of the forests of fig-trees their breed occupied.

they will see once again rivers freed from vast mounts,
wherein howling swim hippopotami immense,
wherein, bleached by the Moon that casts their silhouettes,
they sink to drink as they batter bullrushes down.

and, replete with their ponderous valour, they pass
as if a blackened strip, onto limitless sand;
and the desert claims its immobility back
when from the vista the massive voyagers vanish. 

 

from Leconte de Lisle, Poemes barbares. n.d. [1900]. Lemerre: Paris. pp. 183-185.







Olchar E. Lindsann has published nearly 50 books of literature, theory, translation, and underground history including six books of the ongoing series Arthur Dies (Luna Bisonte). His work has appeared in Otoliths, Lost & Found Times, Brave New Word, No Quarter, Slova, Fifth Estate, and elsewhere; and he has performed sound poetry and lectured extensively. He is the editor of mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, whose catalog includes over 250 print publications of the contemporary and historical avant-garde, and of the periodicals Rêvenance, Synapse, and The in-Appropriated Press. He also translates work of the French avant-garde of the 19th & early 20th centuries.

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