Régis Bonvicino | 03 set 2013 | English
Seven poems from Bonvicino’s forthcoming collection Estado Critico [Critical Condition]
translated by Odile Cisneros
Régis Bonvicino is our 21st flâneur, the Baudelairian lyric poet in the age of terminal capitalism, whose stark narratives of the everyday and recurring use of material from popular culture would be exquisite were it not for dystopian discharges that seep into the very fabric of the prosody. Any yet, against all odds, perhaps to spite them, the poems of Estado crítico are exquisite and wry and uncannily prescient in their fierce fight with life.
––Charles Bernstein
Another Storm
Street infects rain
plastic bottle drift by
unlabeled, naked
storm exhibits river waste
a dog fumbles
amid tree trunks
the rain verges on collapse
destroys a shack
culverts
reeking of turpentine
the tip of the CEO’s pencil
triggers a different storm
Bone_Soup@Neruda.com
In the gift shop at La Chascona
post cards
books by Neruda
T-shirts:
“I never stopped in the fight”
Che’s face,
unarmed and ill
José, the Mapuche terrorist
finally was caught
the CIA did the job
narco-terrorist honchos
were also nailed down
on that dizzying day too
a Peruvian told me that
Pablo, his Chilean uncle
a rich and greedy man
saltpeter dealer in Pisagua
was born again as a rat
Critical Condition
It’s the sarcophagus of a piranha-tart
It’s a near-sighted Tarzan
Scanning a blue sky
It’s Silêncio Nightclub
It’s a fink finking Drummond
like a fire extinguisher
It’s Sá-Carneiro’s translation
into Portuguese
It’s Baudelaire in twelve equal payments
It’s a babysitter for bugs
It’s a tractable Jean Genet
The middleman pushes ostriches
In a poke for Rimbaud
It’s the incredible portable bathtub
in the apartment where
Mayakovsky shot himself
Fable (2)
The butterfly is an inside-out tale
letters pierced by light rays
it’s raining a dry rain
the hardy fuchsia, a reality gain
the Araguaney tree is a scentless
despotic word
the giant dahlia is now a petal-less plant
abstractly, algae pollute the lake
there’s no way out for the haze
the word dies before its time
the butterfly turns into stone
its wing, however, projects
Glass
Nine a.m.
cold Sunday morning
tourist crossing
a deserted Regent Street
lights still on
at Pret a Manger
Bob Dylan’s “I’d go hungry,
I’d go black” playing
red Bentley
quietly drives by
strange
vision
on the glass wall
under the “Fitness Centre” awning
a motionless
gray sleeping bag
a beanie wraps his face
Hong Kong
It’s eternity and sincerity
in the back of a bus
It’s the deck of the old Bank of China
at night
It’s a fog screen
It’s the new Bank of China
In the night skyline, jutting out
It’s a missile fired from Beijing
It’s a Daoist monk in robe
treading the Hyatt Regency’s red carpet
It’s water from a waterfall spraying the train tracks
seen from the hotel room
China paying off Hong Kong
It’s self-mutilating beggar hunting for his income
It’s a boy biting a cigarette in the morning
It’s a tie tied to a clothes hanger
inspired by Italy
It’s loudspeakers blaring Jobim and Astrud Gilberto
in Lamma Island
It’s green beans and ground beef
It’s a weight-loss drug for overweight monkeys
It’s avant-garde bottles for jasmine tea
It’s the building of the old Tung Choi Street market
collapsing, water spinach
It’s a toothless Chinese man in a watercolor
It’s the poet Yu Jian’s bald head producing clean, renewable energy
in a hotel lobby
It’s an attack by neon Buddhas
It’s a flamboyant tango dancer
It’s a grave with a deck overlooking the ocean
It’s an Amazonian parrot on a golden perch
Perrier-Jouët champagne in a flute glass
It’s Tin Chan Temple
a gigantic Buddha
a Coca-Cola freezer in his belly
It’s “Delay no more”
stickers at Ladies’ Market
Diu lay lo mo, fuck your mother
It’s an Audi with tinted windows
It’s Hermès
A half, full moon
It’s a cloud above the sea
a panther
Later on, the sun
Last Words
Black breast milk
is a useless metaphor
the dry line of this narrative
perhaps
is the black city in Romania
a swig of diesel fuel
the Chinese seamstress pisses
a black ideogram
on a chair
–a matter of logistics–
a worker at rest
beneath the aim of a rifle
a VIP soldier urinates
on the dead body of the enemy
the medium trots on a horse
and levers his tithe
it’s a spell cast for the sorcerer
it’s an event planning service
for the inner city underclass
it’s a top-notch street vendor
black breast milk
poisons bats
it’s an uneven magnet
in the sunset
a man inspects
his own gut
from the frontline of lack
he fires his last words
This Poem
This poem
is unremarkable
not unlike the rest –
just for a moment,
illustrates, apathetically,
the past, it catches flies
pays interest
has no air sac
snakes, mice, thieves
scorn its grave
plush wolves howl,
its future is moot
it’s a blind bee and its mate wearing glasses
it’s tongue is no sponge
it’s antennae scent out Drummond
unable to see in the dark
it makes no enemies
survives an attack
has no barbs
it puts up with the world
Fable
They killed the jaguar
his fables above all
they burned mulleins
fearing their words
might proliferate
the green ingá tree is a victim of revenge
they blew up the butterfly in mid-air
a gun disguised as a belladonna plant
the neck of a bottle chokes
an oyster in a coma
a plastic rod crushes
a turtle’s jaw
a blue-black grassquit steals a vulture’s copyright
a soldier tears out a smooth billed ani’s
vocal chords
the dry fountain dies out
the cloud arms itself
the railing corrodes the rain