Abdul kader el janabi
Five poems (1974-1986)
History always wants to refer me to you,
andre breton
These lines are decicated to
The bandits of the windy city
André breton,
Windows are open
And your becoming is eyed by their curtains.
From under the blanket of unapplied thought
I see you holding a dream
Curved between your hands
A phoenix smeared with blond haze rises up
And gives you a sultry look
For you are handsome like “a militant swan”
Whose tongue is wading into my enemies’mouths.
Indications of flames you smile
Foresights which permit
Civilizations to melt into celestial bodies
Streets to pile in mobile corpses
And flowers to bleed the four corners of the air.
There is no bird curious to fornicate a wood
The old-timers are of no consequence.
To furbish their sobered call
They kneaded the tongues of a horizontal insomnia
They are priest-ridden dogs
The needle of death is their phallic symbol
And i should say
You have to go down the paper
Loaded with a growling anguish
To be hurled on the bedrooms of their visions.
But you come to me never with what they know.
For i see you a woodfire butterfly
Cleaving cascades of knowledge
A blazing running water
Whose depth is a shape of elsewhere
An epicurean domain engraved on the stone of flesh
With fingers comparable
To the interior convulsions of uneven sounds
Then i se you “touching only the heart of things”
And mossy vibration
As a limpid nightfall
Tiptoes in my wide-awake sleep.
You “hold the thread”
And i still see a curious childhood
Stronger than death
Weaving invisible sands.
Implanted in the shores of sleepless mirrors
Where the gesture of insurrections
Sings its reincarnation.
The poem is a being
And history – the hive of ironies – is in no hurry
To see that a windy city
Is reserved
For your springs.
The time before a rendez-vous with my bed
In an absent manner i remember things.
My chair is barking beneath me
A shoal of fun minds my wrist
And the high level hailstorm headlines my nobody.
I am a tiger of languages
Contemplating in a jungle of dictionaries.
Wandering in despair
I saw the blond girl whose nightie made of insomnia
Infringing the caper of the laughter
I can get nothing out of her gingerbread
Which is melted like a cirrus
In the nomad’s mouth where i generated
The experience of last night.
I was anguished
I moved to the abyss of thing
Hoping to knock the nation over.
I rushed into the street
And it was dark like a piece of ice.
I didn’t have a knife
But before you could say knife
I skinned time
Taking its flesh and bones
Making of them
A barbarian full of ardent shrieks
Having no equal in snaring a look
Nor in denting a passing smile.
I released him hovering on the mountains
Where dreams lurked everywhere
Ramifying the rampage of the i.
And then on returning
He could not find the way
And fell into deep discouragement
Smoking his last bun of nexus.
I retraced my steps
Went up many times
And not seeing how to get out
Ifell asleep
Instantly waking to him
Vomiting his own flesh
In the vessel of darkness
And he told me
” you will find here what you seek”
And disappeared.
The celebration day of my childhood
When the sun reclines along the shoulder of the night
When the people drink their remembrance
And disappear in a faucet
When the outcry of an injured cloud honks the town
When solitude goes foundering between my hands
When the roar of the seer leaks out of my door
When the mouth swallows the word with a glass of haze
When the dream throws the ocean into disorder
When my laughter wanders in despair near your table
When eyesight swarms the void with labyrinth
When boredom falls to decay
And the moment rises up voyaging in a timeless region
I will plunge in there
Bringing you here
And balancing my childhood on your absence
Like a bald light
On a distance of ice.
Emulation
For ladislav guderna
Does the image eat
Does the word drink
Does the brush itself think.
On the fingertips
A shadow, a river
And moisture capable of giving birth
To living things.
Make money not love
Says the motto
And the oil rises up
In a pasture of thoughts
Breaking through the crust
To blink on the untrodden.
The image does not eat
The word does not drink
The brush does not think
But they keep hungering for a man
Benighted on the road
In the core of his eyes
A reverence, a hair
And a rill of ire.
Bildung
Homage to g. E. Von gruebaum
Here is my share of sand :
A purple soul
Born in the desert
Sheltered in a tent
They removed my foreskin
They showed me my totemic ancestor
Picturesque vestiges without redemption
They taught me what is guts
What is ink
Granted me the scripture
Let me thieve through medieval nights
Holding moon against sun
Hitting on a solution.
When the day of reason broke
They brought me a camel
– the prophet’s mount –
Sent me to work amidst the debris
Splintering mirrors of otherness
In the hope of being attuned to that very rhetorization
And before falling asleep
They advised me not to dream of perfection
It’s lagging behind
They told me
Decay is in the present
Tomorrow is also decay
Everything will fall apart
Dust is master of all
All poems were written directly in english
