THE ROSE
I was never bothered by the rose. Some people talk about it all the time. It fades, it blooms. They see it in visions, they have it, they miss it. I made some small efforts to worry about the rose but they never amounted to much. I don’t think you should do those things to a flower. They don’t exist anyhow. The garden doesn’t exist either. Believe me, these things stand in the way. I was with a man when he actually saw the rose. He said his mother was standing at the centre of it. I went to war with the rose on my banner but I didn’t fight very well. The rose has never eluded me. It’s the most natural thing to see it burning in the air in front of me like a little fire in the middle of a sheet of paper, a bright hole with blackened edges. Sometimes it floats over my shoulder like a red umbrella. It has four green leaves at the cardinal points. It claims to sponsor these lines. It is a very modest claim but it stands in the way. It was granted to me to discard the authority of the rose. Between the cheeks it still has its terrors. These are harmless conventions. I smell the fragrance. It has even filled up my car on the highway far from any flower bed. I can feel the thorns if I want to move my hand that carelessly. All this is perfectly natural. Sometimes the rose occupies the opening of the far end of a tunnel. I never allow this to dignify my approach. They are continually hovering in windows and other apertures which attract light or desire. They are usually perceived one at a time and while the petals may undulate the centre is still. I never greet the rose and I never ask it to represent an idea or a woman. I find this stands in the way. Everywhere I discover men speaking to the rose. It does not improve their ordinary conversation. Then there is the wound like a rose. This is a particularly nauseating conception. The rose-wound. The petals are made of blood and the energy is made of pain. One of these dwells under my white shirt. There are three roses in my room right now and another trying to establish me as its centre. These are interfering dreams. Don’t trouble yourself to brush them aside. You wouldn’t know how to do it anyway, and they would probably install themselves on the floor near your feet in theatrical attitudes of agony and neglect.
NOT GOING BACK
It’s been hard since I left The Garden
I don’t feel so good in my clothes
But I’m not shaking hands with The Warden
And I’m not going back to The Rose
I miss the vice of a man like Christ
And there’s too many Arthur Rimbauds
But I’m not going back to Paradise
And I’m not going back to The Rose
MONTREAL
Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again.
We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist radical defectors from le Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church. Long ago the Catholic Church became a pebble beside the rock on which The Church was founded. The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. The Church despises your tiny works of death and The Church declares that EVERY MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD IS PROTECTED.
FRENCH AND ENGLISH
I think you are fools to speak French
It is a language which invites the mind
to rebel against itself causing inflamed ideas
grotesque postures and a theoretical approach
to common body functions. It ordains the soul
in a tacky priesthood devoted to the salvation
of a failed erection. It is the language
of cancer as it annexes the spirit and
installs a tumour in every honeycomb
Between the rotten teeth of French are incubated
the pettiest notions of destiny and the shabbiest
versions of glory and the dreariest dogma of change
ever to pollute the simplicity of human action
French is a carnival mirror in which the
brachycephalic idiot is affirmed and encouraged
to compose a manifesto on the destruction of the sideshow
I think you are fools to speak English
I know what you are thinking when you speak English
You are thinking piggy English thoughts
you sterilized swine of a language that has no genitals
You are peepee and kaka and nothing else
and therefore the lovers die in all your songs
You can’t fool me you cradle of urine
where Jesus Christ was finally put to sleep
and even the bowels of Satan cannot find
a decent place to stink in your flat rhythms
of ambition and disease
English, I know you, you are frightened by saliva
your adventure is the glass bricks of sociology
you are German with a licence to kill
I hate you but it is not in English
I love you but it is not in French
I speak to the devil but it is not about your punishment
I speak to
