BLAISE CENDRARSStill, I was a really bad poet.
I didn’t know how to take it all the way.
I was hungry
And all those days and all those women in all those cafés and all those glasses
I wanted to drink them down and break them
And all those windows and all those streets
And all those houses and all those lives
And all those carriage wheels raising swirls from the broken pavement
I would have liked to have rammed them into a roaring furnace
And I would have liked to have ground up all their bones
And ripped out all those tongues
And liquefied all those big bodies naked and strange under clothes that drive me
mad...
I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution...
And the sun was an ugly sore
Splitting apart like a red-hot coal.
Back then I was still quite young
I was barely sixteen but I’d already forgotten about where I was born
I was in Moscow wanting to wolf down flames
And there weren’t enough of those towers and stations sparkling in my eyes
In Siberia the artillery rumbled—it was war
Hunger cold plague cholera
And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses
In every station I watched the last trains leave
That’s all: they weren’t selling any more tickets
And the soldiers would far rather have stayed...
An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod.
Me, the bad poet who wanted to go nowhere, I could go anywhere
...‘‘Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?’’
Yes, we are, we are
All the scapegoats have swollen up and collapsed in this desert
Listen to the cowbells of this mangy troop
Tomsk Chelyabinsk Kansk Ob’ Tayshet Verkne-Udinsk Kurgan Samara Penza-
Tulun
Death in Manchuria
Is where we get o√ is our last stop
This trip is terrible