My trousers gaped from disrepair, my shirt
was buttonless; my pursuit was the line
I’d strike into a lyric. The ground hurt.
I lay at night exposed to cold star-shine.
On autumn evenings sitting by a ditch
I listened to the stars and felt the dew
cold on my forehead burnt to fever-pitch
by a strong wine. I acted out my part
playing the lyre on laces threaded through
the busted boot I nursed beneath my heart.
At the Green Inn
(Au Cabaret-Vert)
For a whole week I ripped my boots to shreds,
scuffing the stones. I entered Charleroi,
and at the Green Inn asked for buttered bread
and half-cooled ham. The waitress was a toy.
Happy, I stuck my legs out underneath
the green table and studied the artless
designs of the wallpaper, then the dress
of the big-breasted girl, no straps, a sheath
— a kiss wouldn’t scare her vivacity —
she brought me my request, and smilingly
let her eyes dance upon the coloured plate,
pink and white ham spiked with clove of garlic,
and filled my beer-mug, I could hear it tick,
a sunbeam lit the froth’s heady gold spate.
Hunger
(‘Faim’, Une saison en enfer)
If I have a taste
it’s for the earth and stones.
I always feed on air,
rock, coal and iron.
My hungers circulate
elect fields of sound,
drain the bright poison
of convolvuli.
Eat the broken pebbles,
old church stone,
boulders left by floods,
bread sown in grey valleys.
* * *
The wolf howled under the leaves,
spitting out bright feathers
of his feast of fowl:
like him I consume myself.
Lettuce, fruit
wait only to be picked;
but the hedge-spider
eats only violets.
Let me sleep! Let me simmer
on Solomon’s altars.
The scum boils over the rust
and flows into the Cédron.
Finally, o happiness, o reason, I removed from the sky the blue which is black, and I lived as a gold spark of cosmic light. From joy, I adopted the most absurd and exaggerated modes of expression:
It is found again!
What? Infinity.
It is the sea
mixed with the sun.
My eternal soul,
live your dream
despite the lonely night
and the flaming day.
So you free yourself
from human suffering,
common aspirations!
You fly off free...
– Always without hope
and no orietur.
Science and patience,
torture is sure.
No more tomorrow
satin starfire,
your resolute heat
is duty.
It is found again!
What? Infinity.
It is the sea mixed
with the sun.
Stupra: Three Scatological Sonnets
(Les Stupra)
1
Ancient beasts copulated on the run,
their glans coated with blood and excrement.
Our fathers puffed their big dicks out, displayed
their wrinkled foreskins and bark-grainy balls.
The medieval woman, angel or pig
asked for a lover with huge dimensions.
Even a Kleber, judging by his pants,
seemed to have debatable resources.
Man and the proudest mammals have one front;
their giant pricks are very like our own,
but a sterile period has struck, the horse
and the bull have bridled their white-hot heat,
and no one again will display genitals
in the woods where children invent first sex-games.
2
Our arse-holes are not theirs. Often I saw
men unbutton their pants behind a hedge,
and in those unembarrassed childhood baths
I studied the architecture of the arse.
Tight, and in most cases white, its easy curves
are formed by planes of muscles, and it’s screened
by a network of hairs; for women it’s a slit,
a groove black with tufted satin flowers.
A moving and wonderful inventiveness
of painted angels on a blue tableau
recalls the cheek where a smile indents flesh.
Oh! to be naked now, twitching for fun,
my head moving down on my friend’s fat cock,
both of us whispering in ecstasy.
3
Obscure and wrinkled like a violet
it breathes, worn out and modest amongst moss,
curved incline to the tangled pit.
Threads hang like gossamers of milk, small tears
pushed back by a rebuffing wind
over small clots of reddish marl,
they lose themselves in droplets on the slopes.
In my dream my mouth sucked at the crack,
my soul, jealous of this wild coitus,
makes it a tearful place, lamenting nest.
It’s the olive and the cajoling flute,
the tube from which heavenly praline flows,
feminine Canaan sticky with moisture.
*
About Jeremy Reed:
Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born writer, poet and prose stylist. Reed has published over seventy major works in twenty-five years. He has written more than three dozen books of poetry, fourteen novels, two autobiographies, and several volumes of literary and music criticism. He has also published translations of Montale, Genet, Cocteau, Nasrallah, Adonis, Bogary and Hölderlin. His work has been translated abroad in numerous editions and into more than a dozen languages.
He has received awards from the National Poetry, Somerset Maugham, Eric Gregory, Ingram Merrill, and Royal Literary Funds. He has also won the Poetry Society’s European Translation Prize.
Reed began publishing poems in magazines and small publications in the 1970s.
His influences include Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, J.G. Ballard, Stephen Barber, David Bowie and Iain Sinclair. Reed has a long history of publication with Enitharmon, Peter Owen and Creation Books.
Jeremy Reed has collaborated with the musician Itchy Ear. They perform live under the name Ginger Light.
Jeremy Reed’s website is www.jeremyreed.com
Works by Jeremy Reed:
NOVELS:
The Lipstick Boys
Blue Rock
Red Eclipse
Inhabiting Shadows
Isidore (a novel about Lautréamont)
Red Hot Lipstick (erotic stories)
When The Whip Comes Down (a novel about De Sade)
The Pleasure Chateau (an erotic trilogy)
Chasing Black Rainbows (a novel about Artaud)
Diamond Nebula
Dorian (a sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Boy Caesar
The Grid
Here Comes the Nice
POETRY:
Target
A Long Shot to Heaven
The Isthmus of Samuel Greenberg
Saints & Psychotics
Bleecker Street
A Man Afraid
By the Fisheries
Nero
Selected Poems
Engaging Form
Nineties
Brigitte’s Blue Heart
Claudia Schiffer’s Red Shoes
Turkish Delight
Red Haired Android
Kicks
Sweet Sister Lyric
Saint Billie
Black Sugar
Dicing For Pearls
Heartbreak Hotel
Duck and Sally Inside
Orange Sunshine
This is How You Disappear
Bona Drag
West End Survival Kit
Black Russian: Out-Takes 1978-9
Piccadilly Bongo
Bona Vada
Whitehall Jackals (with Chris McCabe)
Nothing But a Star
The Glamour Poet Versus Francis Bacon
TRANSLATIONS:
The Coastguard’s House (Eugenio Montale)
Tempest of Stars (Jean Cocteau)
The Complete Poems (Jean Genet)
Praries of Fever (Ibrahim Nasrallah)
All That’s Left to You (Ghassan Kanafani)
On Entering the Sea (Nizar Qabbani)
The Sheltered Quarter (Hamza Bogary)
Hymn to the Night (Novalis)
NON-FICTION:
Heart on my Sleeve
Madness: The Price of Poetry
Angels, Divas and Blacklisted Heroes
Caligula – Divine Carnage (with Stephen Barber)
Dead Brides (Edgar Allan Poe) – Introduction
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) - Introduction
Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll) – Introduction
The Songs of Maldoror (Lautréamont) – Postscript
The Dilly – A History of Piccadilly Rent Boys
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
Lipstick, Sex and Poetry (autobiography)
Bitter Blue (autobiography)
POETRY/PHOTOGRAPHY:
Pop Stars (1995) – with Mick Rock
Big Orange Day (2010) – with Lisa Wilkerson
Exploding into Colour (2012) – with Lisa Wilkerson
Above the Waves (2013) – with Lisa Wilkerson
BIOGRAPHY:
The Last Star (Marc Almond
Another Tear Falls (Scott Walker)
Waiting For the Man (Lou Reed)
The Last Decadent (Brian Jones)
Born to Lose (Jean Genet)
Delirium (Arthur Rimbaud)
A Stranger on Earth (Anna Kavan)
The King of Carnaby Street (John Stephen)
4 Poets & A Play (Ashbery, Gunn, Weiners, Francis Bacon)