Louis
Bourgeois
-
10 poems -
A Boy Named
Trinity
for Zippo
1.
He wanted to fill the universe with mass—he wanted to go faster
than light—he wanted
to destroy it all
in order to posses it all, in order to give meaning to himself—which
was
perfect in every
respect save that of having meaning.
2.
All you wanted was a word you could call your own. Just one syllable
that made sense,
one sound that indubitably
came from within you that couldn’t have come from
elsewhere. You,
creator of many forms, you do not live in reality—you are constantly
at
odds with the universe,
at odds with Nothingness and the Void.
3.
I told him to let his mind go, just let it loose, and he did, and a
whole city block exploded
into deep flames.
A Poem is
a Metronome, or Should Be
Why can’t
he write? He would like to reclaim all his yesterdays by turning them
into
poems, thereby learning
something about himself and perhaps about the world around
him. But there seems
to be a lack of willpower on his part that won’t allow him to
enter
the un-reality of
his seemingly discursive past.
Against
Writing
I either cannot or will not write.
I can find no justification
for it.
How can you compete
with generation after generation of useless breath and staggering
piles of flesh of
everyone who has died and will die?
Why do you dare
to halt death by the paltry demarcations of the written word?
To rebel you say?
It’s true that the sun and moon must be destroyed each day. It
is a
great temptation,
but consider, dear reader, sweet reader, that even the sun and moon
will
turn into dust and
dust will turn into ash, and that eventually ash too will disappear
into
the elements and
anti-elements.
There is no justification
for writing, anymore than there is for eating, walking, sleeping,
fucking, working,
retiring, destroying, creating—as the cliché goes, it’s
all the same in
the end.
Consider that next
time your grand masterpiece of human existence makes the best-
sellers list.
No, truly, let the
notion fertilize within you and grow. All things slip deep into you,
deep
into your blood.
Be rational; and I assure you you’ll never set pen to paper again.
And if you are a
believer, consider that if God does exist, he too is doomed to
annihilation in
a contracting and dissolving universe.
There is no solution
for existence, least of all writing. There is nothing that needs to
be
proved, or even
said in the manner of anti-proof, there is nothing that you don’t
already
know, and there
is nothing in all the books you’ve written that anybody needs
to know.
There is no logical
basis for life or writing. Writing and existence is as futile as pruning
roses or nuclear
war.
Rest well, dear
reader, dear writer, the end becomes you.
Alfonzo
the Survivor
There was a boy who was perfectly healthy but didn’t like to be
healthy because
everyone paid too
much attention to him.
Why should I be
like all the others, he exclaimed to himself; I will choose to be sick
so as
to be different.
He became sickly
overnight, as if God had granted his spoken wish, and he was
immensely happy
because all the others who paid so much attention to him throughout
his short life wouldn’t
come within a mile of him.
And in his culture
of isolation he lived to an old age and died blissfully alone.
Faux Dieu
I created the stars,
but regretted it instantly. Father told me not to create matter, so
as not
to upset the universal
balance of nothingness. Father said, To create anything is not only
superfluous but
painfully misleading and will only lead to needless suffering.
I did not go to
Father, but to Mother, Mother of Eternal Night. She said she forgave
me
for creating the
stars and if I created nothing more, then no great harm would come to
the
universe. But I
got older, and whoever created Boredom was the true culprit of
disharmony for I
couldn’t help myself when I gave into my impulses and created
planets
and moons.
It was then that
Father sought me out to destroy me, for he knew where all this was going
and he was right
too; I was creating in order to amuse myself, not out of any virtuous
principles whatsoever.
I did not want to
die again like I had so many times before. Whenever Father got the
notion in his head
that I was being a disobedient son, he would kill me and I would have
to go through the
obnoxious process of being reborn, a process I can’t describe
here
because there is
no language to describe it. I hid on the third planet I created and
there
was nothing but
rock and thick vapors. Father is so confused by material manifestations;
I knew he wouldn’t
find me on this planet. In hiding, I began to create all kinds of things
and quite by accident
created Life, that is, I created Time, the very thing Father most
feared I would bring
into existence.
Father was really
too old to be Nothingness, but he somehow held on to his position. In
fact, his powers
have somehow expanded even greater than in his youth, for now he is
the
all-encompassing
Abyss. He is now everything that is truly important. So much so, that
he doesn’t
seek me out any longer, he is far past worrying about my silly habit
of
creating.
And now I have created
all this life, and I am remorseful because the poor living entities
were somehow—from
my sloppy alchemy—imbued with Purpose and Hope; they suffer
in such a way that
I will never be able to comprehend. But if I could find a way to
communicate with
them, if I could just find a way to understand their language, I would
like to tell them
to be happy because I know for a fact that their energy force will not
last
very long, therefore
their suffering is short lived, for soon Father will wipe out all my
creations and it
will be as if they had never existed.
Half Poem
A blue room filled with shadows. Outside the window, children play in
the wind. The
fields are wide
open. Herons and cranes make their rounds, to a silent pond under dead
trees. I am speaking
to the dead who have been silent for too long. The children play in
dry ditches. They
play with the bones of an armadillo. The jasmine flowers have
swallowed their
pink tongues in the dew. Ebbing calls me. There are shadows of
shadows in this
room. A blue room in dark shadows. The children do not notice the dust.
Pourquoi travaillez
quand la mort est tout autour?
The Baby
I shot a dogre out of the blue sky. With its wing blown off,
it swam in circles for a very
long time before
I rowed out and picked it out of the water. When I got back to the
wharf, I cradled
the little dogre in my arms. It had a black head and blacker
eyes. It had
a white ring around
its bill. It was not a handsome duck, but for a moment, it captured
my sympathy. It
looked sad, liquid death drained from its eyes. You look sad, said I
to
the little duck.
It replied, I am a dying baby, why don't you kill me? I said, I am a
one
armed man, why don't
you kill me! It said, I am a one winged duck, why don't you kill
me first then kill
yourself? I told the dogre that I did not want to die, but
that I would be
happy to do it in
if that's really what it wanted. The little duck said that it very much
wanted to die. I
tied a brick to the dogre's tail and threw it overboard into
the green
water. From above,
I could see it flapping its only wing and the dogre grew sadder
and
sadder as it sunk.
I could read its lips, it said, fuck you before it died. I said to myself
that god was a duck
and I drew out my shotgun to shoot some more.
The Teacher
I lie to them. I
tell them that 2x2 makes four, even though I have no idea what that
means
or even if it’s
true. I know their crimson mouths snarl when I turn my back to face
the
black board. I can
feel crimson cutting into me.
I’d like to
tell them the truth, but I just can’t bring myself to do it; I’d
like to tell them
that 2x2=DEATH,
that, in fact, all things equal death, but I am too far gone to be
martyred for telling
the truth.
And one day,
The Teacher disappeared without a sound and was never heard from again,
and was utterly,
utterly forgotten, as if she had never been born, and she left behind
no
legacy of courage.
Witness
Someone put a huge
clock in the middle of the garden and the clock resembled Jesus
Christ Superstar;
it was fucking up the biorhythms of the figs and oranges. The Serpent
who lived in the
garden, wanted to eat the clock but couldn’t so he made love to
this
clock that resembled
Jesus Christ Superstar—
And the earth began
to hemorrhage and it turned greener than ever before.
Zone Poem
The cripple lies peacefully in a darkened room. Sometimes, he plays
amazingly
melancholic tunes
on an old beat up flute he found lying on the sidewalk outside his
window. He feels
nothing sometimes and other times there is a great euphoria that
overtakes him, honed
by years of being blissfully alone.
