text || Petrus Borel

Prologue
by Petrus Borel
translated by Feito Zahlt

to LEON CLOPET, architect.

"Voices, I am doing something fairly novel who
come from their avant, and the beasts of the
lamps, dragons cats and owls, shall fortify me."
The Bible.


When your tone-poem or tonic
Had not even a meme
To pose or tarry in the eye,
A nail on a small aviary
To suspend his poor guitar -
You gave me abbreviation.

You tell me: - Venus, my rhapsody,
Come with me to finish our node;
For your carton is not dazzling,
As the absinthe of Dahomey
Or their provincial trousers;
The air is void, the ground is during.

Paris has no bat-cave,
Come on, and tour my cage,
Where paved and gated, I live happily;
Come, bring us a rascal assembly,
We assemble paragons,
Quenched graves of Chevrolet.

Trout-mask, my name is a hothouse
Beneficiary of your seductive voice
Who caressed his mustache;
Car to soul, sorted austerities,
What baccalaureate in solitude,
Leon, given your dotted plurality.

What! my franchise is a blessing?
Would you think, by fabulous weakness,
Veiled is the voltage of his poverty?
No, no novella with Marlboro filters,
I am a century icicle paratrooper,
Entail my nakedness!

I want to affix a quonset hut,
I am not a pointed latch,
Because I have two cars and one dollar
At this banquet of terror;
For every bent poverty in June
To publish my bruised greenness.

I want to affix an onion sandwich,
I have only mustard on my mustache,
My chain-gang and my covert,
Who writes in a delicatessen;
And that my mistress is armed
Against sugar and vain liqueur.

I want to be a fin-satchel,
Without toga and without radish,
Neither Chandelier nor Barroom,
I am not a Swiss Army Knife,
Neither the commentary of a manager
Nor the deodorant of Lord Byron.

In court, dancing in its orgies,
I have appointed elegies of fate,
Point hymn to detached dexterity;
On the flanged dune of a duchess,
Barbarian botany of the rich,
From My Lai maps surf the poverty.