VIGNETTESby Louis Bourgeois
Half Poem A blue room filled with shadows. Outside the window, children play in the wind. The fields are wide open. Herons and cranes make their rounds, to a silent pond under dead trees. I am speaking to the dead who have been silent for too long. The children play in dry ditches. They play with the bones of an armadillo. The jasmine flowers have swallowed their pink tongues in the dew. Ebbing calls me. There are shadows of shadows in this room. A blue room in dark shadows. The children do not notice the dust. Pourquoi travaillez quand la mort est tout autour?
The cripple lies peacefully in a darkened room. Sometimes, he plays amazingly melancholic tunes on an old beat up flute he found lying on the sidewalk outside his window. He feels nothing sometimes and other times there is a great euphoria that overtakes him, honed by years of being blissfully alone.
I arrived at the house hours before the sun was up and fell asleep in the tall grass of my childhood-someone was whispering to me in monotone éclat, éclat, éclat. Dieu est éclat, but I was not afraid. I have never been afraid. I have never been afraid, but the voice wouldn't leave me alone and it said further, All the fruit in the orchid is poisoned, and all the flowers are yellow. How did that happen? I answered out loud. I also asked the voice why all my dreams were of blood and crabs and it responded, Because you were born with a divine disease. I wanted to get up but couldn't, nothing held me down but my own weight. When I awoke, the sun was just coming up and the grass had withered all around me and I knew I was in Hell because I was surrounded by tall clocks.
Someone put a huge clock in the middle of the garden and the clock resembled Jesus Christ Superstar; it was fucking up the biorhythms of the figs and oranges. The Serpent who lived in the garden, wanted to eat the clock but couldn't so he made love to this clock that resembled Jesus Christ Superstar- And the earth began to hemorrhage and it turned greener than ever before.
For the old whore in Cuba, Alabama who once gave me a dollar without asking why. He was forced to eat a star, although all he wanted was bread. All he wanted was to be normal, but he was pre-determined by the Bucher Shop to have his limbs chopped off for mystical purposes he didn't understand and didn't want to understand-the village priests apparently saw something sacred in deforming him, all the old gods were now held suspect, and in the air an incessant storm was brewing-they said to him, We will feed you and give you a name-You are to speak without imperfection-but as in all matters of society, the village soon became bored of their sacred amputee and starved him to death with moon dust and with solar interstices in his belly.
The world is older than we have imagined. Wherever he walked he saw his own image, on the grey cliffs, on the illusory lakes, in the abandoned temples, in the sky, on the faces of the buffaloes and goats, in the eyes of wasps and cormorants, and an incredible boredom crawled into his heart and would not leave. He set out to find God, but God is often silent. For a long time, he had mistaken this silence for God, but after ten days of starvation and thirst, he realized the silence was himself. His body craved destruction. Finally, it was given to him as a gift; he made a friend of death. Only death is pure, he discovered, and it is only purity we seek. The last thing he saw before leaving the world in acute hunger were large wolves tearing out of the horizon becoming black angels, becoming dust, then nothing, then nothing.
The children of Dust have grown tired of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and have taken all numbers and have thrown them into the Abyss, from which they came. As well, they are utterly irritated with Ancient Knowledge. They have slaughtered Pan, Apollo, and Dionysus. They have taken sledge hammers to their temples and reduced them to pebbles. These children are the Almighty Future and they rightfully demand Clarity, Authenticity, and Truth, even at the expense of Everything that has preceded them. They will prevail and should prevail. Let all who get in the way of their progress be burned at the stake. We have finally arrived at a generation who will make truth stick, even if there are no witnesses left to attest to it. Amen and amen and amen.
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