Tales from Cafe Apollinaire
Variations on Distilled Dreams
There Be Monsters : Beware this poem a warning from an abused reader
(a Tragic Comedy by the Numbers)
Gordon Coombes
Beware this poem of Cafe Apollinaire
just another a Tragic Comedy by the Numbers
it is indeed a travesty
to true poetry
lacking any latin or ancient Greek phrases
no dead leden language appears here
no secret hermetic languages of the dead
no Kabalahistic key is to be found here
no scatalogical interpretations of Celtic
or Nordic runes
no foreign language phrases ripped out of context
are placed here to entice to appease to please
linguistic scholars
no james Joyce no Ezra Pound or their friends
or relatives wrote one line of this poem
James Joyce lost himself
in his own linguistic world of word games
using a hundred languages
discovering a private language of his own
of word puzzles speaking in tongues
revealing the ineffable the unknowable
his own inner jumble jar
and the Jumble Jar of the word filled world
of Finnegan's wake-
Ezra Pound slipped in and out of ancient Greek
into high sounding Italian falling into German phrases
into mysterious Japanese Chinese Cantonese Swahili
making the Cantos sound more profound
becoming more and more untranslatable-
No no let us not go there
there where words are savoured for their sounds
symbols isolated from meaning and sense
a game to play solving a crossword puzzle-
No let us not go there
not to that place again
it is a dark place
filled with horror
images too disturbing
some things we do not want to know
someone says as the American butterfly painter
Whistler the dandy flits
from country to country
lines traced on a map
around the globe in our heads
sliding meandering through history
through tales of world travellers
some returning with a new found vision
some returning wind burned
having lost their centre
directionless foundering
some having spent too much time
in a drug induced state
always partying
all becomes a blurr
memories fading into the mist
some having spent their days
in orgies in the end
all the ceilings and beds
in a hundred different cities
in a hundred hotels and hostels
all look the same
from London to Paris Madrid to Kyoto
to New Delhi to Amsterdam New York to Bejing
to Moscow to Nepal and Cape Town
to Babylon and Samarkand and Ur and Sumer
word addicted book worms
travel in and out of the pages of books
adding more books to their list of books
of what they must read before it's too late
waiting for that one book which will reveal all
the code the key to all the words
in all the books they have read
studied and mastered
filling a thousand notebooks with
a running commentary of all these books-
Deconstructing dismembering
plastic elastic lines of verse
metaphorical lines of prose
words of prey
run to the ground
stretched out
played toyed with
tossed bounced batted
caught on a fish hook
gutted smoke cured
literal poems break
into literal pieces
under the least pressure
barely coherent
disconnected phrasings of drug addicts
wishing to share their distorted visions
all to be taken with a pound of salt
taken in our stride
they sit astride riding
a beast out of control
taking them into labrynth worlds-
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