Tales From Café Apollinaire
variations on distilled dreams
Part 1.
(three ring circus to the sick muse
edited 02/11/02 & Sept. 21, 2017)
gordon coombes
Café Apollinaire is a three ring circus
a side-show of freaks
a poet dining on metaphors
an artist being eaten by painted lions
bones stripped clean of flesh
by imagined dreamed vultures
escaped from brain-fevered induced nightmares
of a starving artist
there's someone in the corner
playing spoons drawing a crowd
forming a new band playing
what is at hand an electric mixer
the Raven-Black haired woman
calls herself a High Priestess
uses a blender grinding up flesh and bones
for a magic potion for love for money
for death and revenge
someone bangs on the keys
of a piano with a hammer -
in the rain a young girl does cartwheels
in the middle of a busy city street
draws pictures on the windows
of Café Apollinaire
with her magic invisible paints
in her eyes I tell you were rainbows
bums cigarettes quarters hits of LSD
miniature New York joints of weed
her pusher psychiatrist keeps
her well supplied with those not so fun drugs
signs her in and out of hospitals
improving for awhile the world outside
doesn't change at all to accommodate her style
at a table with friends suddenly jumps up saying
'I'm coming God, I know now what you want'
she runs to the harbour front jumps in
a couple of strangers pull her out-
Kurt Wiel and Jacques Brel
take turns singing songs of the streets
songs of hopeless romances
songs of true love
late into the night-
The mad artist waves a pearl-handle revolver
in the air walks into his painting
of a field paints a hole in his head
crows take flight blackening
the evening sky-
A post-modern deconstructing poet
begins to disconnect
into a George Seurat painting dot-by-dot
'til all the colors break apart
fade leaving an empty canvas-
At Café Apollinaire two aspiring writers
writing alternate pages to a novel
have hung each page upon the walls
of their cluttered dimly-lit cockroach
rat infested undersized apartment
hoping somehow out of chance
during the night the story
will piece itself together-
In his hands an innocent poet holds the moon
in his eyes he holds moon beams
undermines sanctioned madness
conjures a garland of flowers
tossed around the moon-
Poets Artists chain-smoking cigarettes
sharing sweet weed magic-mushrooms
Absinthe and Laudanum drifting about
talking of God and art
from Mount Sinai to the Sermon on the Mount
from Allah Brahma and Buddha
to Thor Odin Apollo and Zeus
to Isis and Osiris and Ishtar
cannibalizing art and culture
from Impressionism Cubism and Realism
to Expressionism and Surrealism
Dada to deconstructing
another cup of coffee -
Erik Satie's tables and chairs
composed of musical notes
fill our Café where
Dali's melting clocks hang on fleshy walls
dripping spilling onto the floor
outside men in suits & bowler hats
rain down cats and dogs
Pontiff André Breton excommunicates
artistic heretics who fail to follow
Surrealistic Manifestoes -
Angry snarling insulting waiters
serve dishes of stewed art and poetry
some insist on it being raw
others want it over-cooked -
Acting very serious very busy indeed
Marcel Duchamp beavering away
says everything is Art
places written labels on everything
" This is a table " "This is a waiter "
"This is a Urinal" then with a flourish signs his name
someone shouts "Dada Lives"
another shouts "Surrealism Lives"
and a fight breaks out-
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