Ankou

Je suis Ankou!
Je m'appelle Maëlys..
Ur yezh hepken n’eo ket a-walc’h


Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors are purer
Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles of cold flame
Instead of these overripe stones
Choose this heart with its safety catch
Instead of that murmuring pool
And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time
Instead of that marriage blessing joining my forehead to total vanity's
Choose life

Choose life with its conspiratorial sheets
Its scars from escapes
Choose life choose that rose window on my tomb
The life of being here nothing but being here
Where one voice says Are you there where another answers Are you there
I'm hardly here at all alas
And even when we might be making fun of what we kill
Choose life

Choose life choose life venerable Childhood
The ribbon coming out of a fakir
Resembles the playground slide of the world
Though the sun is only a shipwreck
Insofar as a woman's body resembles it
You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory
Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm named your hand
Choose life

Choose life with its waiting rooms
When you know you'll never be shown in
Choose life instead of those health spas
Where you're served by drudges
Choose life unfavorable and long
When the books close again here on less gentle shelves
And when over there the weather would be better than better it would be free yes
Choose life

Choose life as the pit of scorn
With that head beautiful enough
Like the antidote to that perfection it summons and it fears
Life the makeup on God's face
Life like a virgin passport
A little town like Pont-á-Mousson
And since everything's already been said
Choose life instead


Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.


and
What is strangest is inseparable from love, presiding over its revelation in individual as well as in collective terms. Man's and woman's sexual organs are attracted to each other like a magnet only through the introduction between them of a web of uncertainties ceaselessly renewed, a real unloosing of hummingbirds which would have gone to hell to have their feathers smoothed . . .


Nothing could be more worth an effort than making love lose this bitter aftertaste which poetry, for example, does not have. Such an enterprise cannot be entirely successful until on the universal scale we have finished with the infamous Christian idea of sin. There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others — this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence . . .



Since we cannot speak of the landscape of the crowd,
how it turns from hot to cold in a blink,
drains my veins dry, makes my body a ghost of itself,
you ask me if my absence was due to being ‘sick or sad’?

I use the euphemism ‘not well’ to blanket over the trees,
the hills, the path that stops being a path, the carpet
of burned leaves catching the wheels of trains,
the snow duvet that protects the flowers, or kills them
(I can never remember which it is).


My sadness is sick, my sickness is sad.
My sadness has been unplugged from triggers
you could relate to and lives in a different city now.
My sickness is so connected to my sadness that I cannot
tell you which is the chicken, which is the egg.


Here is an ankle sprained after it gave
way on a flat surface like plastic lit by a lighter.
See how it sent my sadness flying and cracked its screen.
Here is my stomach full of rams fighting about fleeing