Vincent BERQUEZ: Satie in Paris

Satie in Paris

Fleeting smoke mesmeric in sound-time,
jumping drone-tones from unsettling man
playing in a lonely shadowed singularity.

Fibrous flickering feet clicking-bawdy songs,
bulking up the waltz, stop-start stutter-noises,
speeding up the early morning cold hands
gravely, moving-pictures pass hysterically by.

The music begins mysteries in living forms,
belting down the hearts of crowds,
walking through the buzzing boulevards,
the actual grudge-work in mortified factories,
a wet-grey urban poverty engulfing the absurd.

He viewed from after and before the effect
of a cheapened life in warfare, in commerce,
before the new migration, the great conflagration,
in revolutions of our hearts, in the light of night,
from the torpedo tobacco begging for fire in bad air.

The wormlike moveable-mass sought salvation
and received craters full of broken sons instead.
Ironic cabaret music played out the times and died.
Underground chambers of rebel artists and composers
seethed sexual ballets, arm-twisted around perversities
in eccentric poses, the dance twisting towards the next.

26.04.09

Vincent Berquez

Vincent Berquez is a London–based artist and poet.

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