ALONE IN THE BACK CAFE

ALONE IN THE BACK CAFE

Paul Murphy - Biography Born in Belfast, 1965.

 He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany.

His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published two pamphlets, one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, London, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing a history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.

Dostoevsky sin Perro

Stay away from me half a dick... (Old Muscovite saying)

Welcome to Moscow we have many madmen
And, luckily, you might say are of former significance.
No one wants this city except for sitcom repros
Of the Classics. remember Raskolnikov?
I am the doppelganger shadow, double, that sat
Up half the night in your room in your arms, wept.
Remember Mr Marmalade? I have his gilt-edged
Snot-picking knife and embroidered toupee,
His phial of cyanide. Remember Leon Trotsky?
He was reconstructed in our finest Hotel,
The Hotel Grace Kelly right beside the former hostel
Red Star. His mummy is dilapidated, everyone
Thinks it stinks, putrid, rank with memories, piss-stained.
With the past, reeking of history. Doestoevsky sans perro
He said, 'I met many wild asses in Switzerland, many wild asses.
I was never interested in Winter sports, and the whores in
Sils-Maria were not amusing. I always headed to the gambling
Dens. For this I have sentenced the human race to decide
To love or hate my Crime and Punishment.’
Endless hashes of Russian madmen, vodka-breathed,
Like Visarrion, our Siberian Jesus, leering, epileptic, visionary.

TWELVE WOODCUTS BY DERYCK

Here you are, the thirteenth disciple
At the last supper:
On your left, no doubt is Thomas
On your right Judas-
Their unblinking eyes hone in on the wood
A shower of Galloglaich is taking cover-
The question is: will the English lancers
Pursue the Irish horse for eternity?
The smell of sweat, excrement, horse manure, blood:
A javelin is thrown, but still they circle
And circle like the prettiest carousel
At the funfair.

Twelve is more than the company,
For there is one more:
Here is the artist, his hair lank and greasy,
He is drunk and sweat glistens on his brow.
You are the absence that even Jesus dared not dream.

Once the pansies, stones, trees were lifted up.
A dark mood, brown study
Things that are hidden, dark words, backstabbings,
Blood at the dim gateway
All that echoes in a moment's time.
For all the pansies, stones, trees
Were sucked up in a formless vortex
The old-placed evil was postponed
Sent off to a never never land beyond the sea.

You, the artist, depict yourself as Jesus
You are your own creation, the eyes glimmer.
They love you, at last. As you gaze beyond
Your creation, past the woods,
The hurridly-arriving Kern
With arquebuses alit, the Light Horse
Disconnect the lances placed in their backs
By your hand, circling more and more
Quickly as another evening comes
Somewhere, sometime in Ireland.


CHARACTER

For Igor Stepanov

CHARACTER

Immense plastic surface reflected immense plastic surface. Lemon hair, potato nose, shirt, trousers. Distant music.

DOXA

Rift of Beethoven, fart of Mozart, dash of Haydn.

DESCRIPTIVE

"Which hotel are you staying at?"
"Schwarzwalderhof." I lied.
"Enjoy the local wine."
"I will."

SUSPIRE

End of fire. Redlight district. Creak of stairs, unloosened, unhinged, unredeemed. Image of mindblistering cunt.

Breathless of the stair, caught between the devil and despair.

COMMUNIST PARTY HQ

4 men unfurling a banner. They direct me to a room on a lower floor. When I arrive there, a derelict, no voicese, threats, entchantments, a burnt out derelict.

THE COMMUNISTS WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN!

Banner headline...

NARRATIVE THREAD

I re-hook. Back and forth went the engine in the no nonsense night. Back and forth, into the womb, tomb and charnel house. I unhitched the lever, pulled and spewed forth the perfect story machine.

4th STAIR

A slow motion shot of me ascending the stair, 4 men unfurling a banner, concealing the deep bucket of babies bodies. Back and forth, back and forth thrummed the machine, it seemed to say, in the repetition of the machine's humming, in the thrum, the deep bowels of the machine, the story is generated. Back and forth, back and forth, my foot touches the 5th stair. Everywhere penises are pushing, pulling, back and forth, a tidal wave of semen is rolling down the stairs towards me, wrapped up inside a cosmic tortilla. A universe of babies, all neatly eaten, all gazing like dead squid with great rotund eyes, out of the bottomless bucket.

The red tide of Communism is stopped, because out of the vacuum reverberates the never-enidng push and pull of the miraculous Capitalist penis, pushing the Communists back and back.


NOT RADIO

An examination of 'system' as a concept in World History.

A play in 1 part

A pair of spectacles, a brush handle. Two exponents of 'system'.

1st exponent of system: a system is a series of components working together to create something, such as a radio.

2nd exponent: take this pair of spectacles and a brush handle.

1st: how do they resemble a radio?

2nd: You can play the brush like a zither, making it moan and groan, an orgasmic brush handle.

1st: I see, any problems...?

2nd: No, any two components can be a 'radio'...your hand, my mouth...

1st: cast on the ether, the gyring, colliding world, these two bodies, radio/not radio, come my love, my radio....


Mehr Licht

"More light" said someone
Both old and dead
Was it possibly Goethe?

AT WOLZNACH

This is Wolznach, tiny village between Munich and Ingolstadt
Red tiled houses, squares, rounds, lopsided fields, views of cows
Perspectives eaten by clouds, chewed by rain, spat out by Westerly winds.

This is Martha and Karl, they have many sheep.
Informed by modern ideas of art they bred cubist lambs who dance
Into the landscape and are eaten mostly by diminishing lines

Of perspectival mathematics contrived by Martha and at the dinner table by Karl.
Rohrbach little village of innocent pleasures but also of occult darkness
Very like many scenes from Roman Polanski's film 'Rosemary's Baby'
Very like old Hammer Horror yellow films starring cheesy Christopher Lee.

Wolznach, Wolznach you offered me the daughter of the Devil to entertain,
But I already have his son and many nieces, his aunt, uncles and even his mother.

One evening the vampire maedchens of Wolznach came to visit me
To caress me in the night, drink my blood and leave by dawn.
Their castle vanishes in the daytime, undead horses and undead coachman.

Undead vampiric sheep caring for undead lambs, undead cattle, undead birds.
Transfusion of water, wine and blood, Wolznach, when will you ever give me back blood?

Night falls on the tiny village of Wolznach, night falls on the vampire maedchens
Now from their tomb they must emerge, now they must go about their business.
Who is that dark stranger? Prey now to the vampire maedchens

What is this interminable, unending dawn, what is this lifeless yet functioning body .
Now I too must sleep by day and fear mirrors, garlic, water and crucifixes.
Being undead is such a drag, but there are immense savings on laundry bills
Rent, food and no one cares much anymore to send rejection letters for my poems
Being far too much in fear of the inevitable retribution (that's enough - Ed).


AT DACHAU

Here truths were raped, here bodies disappeared
Here graves were dug, here trees plug
Each stinking bathwater sunset
Here banality begets banality, here each mortal thought is occluded.

Here Judas was bought, here words were sought
Here fortunes were made, here poets got laid.
Are these lime trees, is this a sunset?

My fingers sing my body electric, 3 lovers one is dying.
Here the bus driver forbade me to eat my ice lollipop
On the bus on the road to Dachau.


God of white and blue

THE POLICE

A PUPPET PLAY - INSIDE THE AUTHOR'S MIND

Author: Is there anything to cannibalise?

3 Policemen together: What!

Author: Cannibalise!

3 Policemen: A cannibal Isle?

Author: Yes, cannibalise...

3 Policemen (dressed as Gaugin maids): Bananas, bamboo, sea...

The Emperor Porcelain: Did anyone say cheese?

3 Policemen: (queriously) What?

The Emperor Porcelain: Cheese!

Author: No!

The Emperor Porcelain: (wearing an apemask) I thought someone said there was cheese. (stretching) I do like some cheese first thing in the morning.

3 Policemen: Bananas, bamboo, sea. Under the shade of a Palm tree, coconuts.


THE INNOCENT PEOPLE

A PUPPET SHOW

Man: The innocent people! Whenever I hear talk about the innocent people it doesn't half make me angry. The innocent people! There was an innocent person, have you ever heard anything like that? From the newspapers, the TV, those films. (putting on a lion mask) There's the TV set, there are some of the innocent people. (puts his foot through the TV set) We had someone claimed he was an 'innocent person', he was just a footstool really. Left the area, went to Spain, I think. Got the ferry to Sicily and leapt into a volcano, but only after taking lessons - 'swim in lava' I think they called them. There was an innocent person drew a penis, a very famous local artist. Afterwards no one talked to him. 'There he is', they said, 'the man who drew the penises.' Or 'thank you and good day Sir.' He stormed off, for no one would listen to his complaints and died in a Godforsaken place, hot with desert landscape and beating heart. (puts on an apemask) What did King Agamemnon do with the innocent people (with immense scepticism)? He loaded them onto an 'orse (a horse appears with backdrop of red flames and black sky) and sent them through the day and the night, Helen's eyes glowering with hint of malice and incredible anger. Achilles slew Hector and dragged him around the city of Troy. Round and round they go. (a carousel of horses appears then a silhouette of Hector dying) King Agamemnon had no time for the innocent people! Julius Caesar! The innocent people! (sobs with anger and pain) He wrecked Gaul, sacked cities, loaded them onto carts and took them to Rome to be slaves. (sound of a cart running over a cobbled street) What did Caesar care for the innocent people! When I talk of that man 'Annibal! (wracked with anger, dons an elephant mask) He fought his way through the Alps and took the innocent people to task, result of his anger and testament to strength. Because that's all there is, at the end of the day. There is strength and there is nothing. Strength is all. What about Adolf Hitler? (wracked with anger and spitting venom) You may accuse me of being morbid, but what did he do with the innocent people? (sound of a divebombing stuka and flak) There were very few innocent people left back then. (raging on...) Today we think we're the innocent people. They never were, for Agemmnon, Caesar, 'Annibal, Hitler are all one. They're all the same. Strength and weakness, weakness and strength.

WORDS

Opal light nick nack spat a love of the rack and the screw
screw time time temps perdu time in abandonment
memory ciphers keys rimless unrhymed lids
lights and time! rough jolly faces hewn from
granitic downpayments, endowments from universities lost
in cosmic rotations beyond memory beyond sense
beyond everyday sensations on the windowpane.
Opal blue emerald green farben rot grun gelb blau
colours, lights, roughly hewed. wrong from the start
in the strong light of intensely satiated emotions
art deco lampshade, your kiss, your hands, shaking
senses and hearts. acid test is alkaline or you.
litmus test feeling form rhythm. what is more than words?

WOMEN

Women, women, women, women, women
many things about their habitual redundancies, leavings.
if they had freedom from the chains of hooverdoom
they might reach for hypocritical knives
to sink into theoretical tailor's dummies or voodoo dolls.
images, fetishism, sado-masochism, scopophilia.
Bigwordtime. Claudia is leaving me, she is taking the train home
she knows the silky sound of snapping emergency cords
more than the sounds of field mice, dogs, rats,
Bohemian cows in rotund fields.
tea leaf, tractor, pitchfork, axe - good tools for devouring men.
everything on the farm is fucking in its pre-determined genetic way
ordained by Claudia - Freia, Demeter Artemis,
Venus - Earth Mother, goddess of vine, earth and shit
she looks one way to the field the other to the sun.


ALONE IN THE BACK CAFE

back room, barlight, skeins of shadows
strimming shadowland, crowd of eejits
silly fiddly dee music, windys busted thru
a million bricks and bombblasts.
pockmarked walls and faces.
Windmilling moon, stars, sawdust
thrown up in an unsavoury place
blood, bullets, ash, cinders, rust
like a penny thrown into the air
falling cinders, stars, windmilling
giants not windmills, tuppeny pints.
an air from a Weill\Brecht collaboration
fragments of Seargent Pepper.
song, star, windless night
Brecht, Beatles, endless night
caught on the windmill time
lights! shadows strim
hearts made from straw dance on the glass -time!

PAINTING IN SUSHI BAR

Samurai, Shogun, Hara Kiri
sipping green tea in the Sushi Bar
crowd of headers, all eyes down.
chopsticks, raw fish, raw headache
from wine, beer. screen, fan Geisha girl
tightened at the soles of her feet
atom bomb, entrails, glints in her eye.
shark fin soup shining in a moondance
of atoms, entrails, dancing moonlight
screen, fan, atom girl.

Sketch of a Tractor in Bavarian Landscape

I am a Munich street artist
spawned by our great father
the father of all street artists.
I paint from postcards
scenes of the Dom,
little sketches of the dancer
Lola Montez and portraits
of Cosima and Richard Wagner.

I am a Munich street artist
I look at his terrible flowers everyday.
at Odeonsplatz I throw
my coat on the ground
at the space he fell
I can't see the spaces history
falls into, but I can see
his face, the terrible flowers

that rise up out of the cracks
in the pavement, that fell
where he fell, terrible
flowers that yawn and devour
men. in the Haus der Kunst
a waving woman
on the landscape
a tractor is thrumming

I am painting the tractor
the terrible flowers
the waving woman
the dancer Lola Montez
Richard and Cosima.
Nietzsche is dying
Achilles is born.
Mars and Venus masturbate

the flower stems
the terrible tractor
the waving flowers
the thrumming woman
the thrumming waving woman
the stems of the tractor
tyre metal steel plastic leaf oil
observe the terrible thrumming woman

so that the tractor is born.


Slavoj Zizek

very interesting Yugoslav intellectual
interpreted 'The Matrix' birddroppings on the WTC
some signs from an Aztec mummification
encoded Linear B type triptych very like a Map of Atlantis
spaceeship symbols, encodements, crop circles
statue of Elvis on Mars, Milky Way, Milky Bar.

my cat says she's Eva Braun
a soapstar, Hollywood bunny
androgynous vamp from the Louise Brooks era
my cat knows Slavoj Zizek
speaks to him on the phone daily
Lacanian fur, her Electra Complex
unknowable triangles - mother, father, Brookes kitten.
Mother married a Manx hang up about his no tail
early signs of lice, my cat thinks she is on fire
a burning smell, witness to the primal act.
Mummy, daddy - she-kitten
but how did she - kitten come about?

Slavoj Zizek impregnated the Universe
with spume and semen pouring forth
his mighty dialectic about 'The Matrix'
Mummy, Aztec, Elvis, Manx, Milky Way
she-kitten gives up psychoanalysis
seeks a Behaviourist.

KEVIN BACONOLOGY or INSIGNIFICANCE


Child's pop up storybook village, absurdity and mind-boggling banality. Insignificance. 'Citizen Kane' the most important film of all time, the experts all agree, they are paid to agree. Rosebud, the name of Kane's sled, the key to the enigma of Kane's life and personality. Common denominators. Hollywood, the most significant common denominator on the planet. Taking all the films made in the last 20 years in Hollywood, the actor with most credits is the Canadian actor, Kevin Bacon. Although not a star, Kevin Bacon has more appearances in more films as 3rd or 4th supporting actor. The common denominator, the thing that binds humanity together in an unending, indefatigable chain is the Canadian actor Kevin Bacon. In Jerusalem, Cairo, London, Mexico City crowds walk to their synagogues, churches, temples, mosques to bow down before the statue, the image, the icon of Bacon. Baconism, a world conquering religion, philosophy, a mantra, code, language of ultimacy and eternity. Bacon - Godhead, Messiah, supporting Star.

Rosebud. The sled is cast into the fire at the end of 'Citizen Kane'. The child loses his toy, for the last time the sled burns, the paint flakes and bubbles, the wooden frame burns. Kane had a taste for opera and for women, his political ambitions are destroyed by an affair. His wife and his rivals destroy him. He walks past an endless hall of mirrors, the shattered image of Kane in the hall of mirrors. Mass man, American man, his identity diffuse, his life a kaleidoscope, a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be pieced together by those who are paid to uncover scandals, other people's lives.

In Rohrbach 'rosebud' means desire. The signifier disconnected from its root - the oven, the ending, the enigma - has become a trope for illicit desire. Rosebud is as unmentionable as sin. This word, this anger, this metaphor for desire, this disconnection. Rosebud is the taboo that even Freud failed to analyse. In the fields near Rohrbach Jesus walks with the 12 disciples. At the street corner Marx, Plato, Beethoven and the Buddha discourse on truth and virtue. In the village Chapel Bach conducts his Brandenburg Concertoes. Rohrbach is the wormhole, the bin, the redundancy, the silent, still unspeakable place where all that was formerly significant before the triumph of Baconism, goes to. At Rohrbach Einstein and Newton argue over the Big Bang, Relativity, get drunk and fight. Einstein is spitting blood, headbutting Newton. Newton kicks Einstein in the balls. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Natalie Wood, JFK in a field, sipping beer and eating cheesywotsits and bread. No mention of Rosebud.

All the former fame and glory descend into the still, unspeaking, unspoken centre. Rohrbach. The Universe's bibliothek of significance and insignificance. Appearance and deception, an unending dawn. The dawn of the undead. Immortality, unendingness, an unending chain letter, a diatribe stuffed into the Universe's gaping jaw. The Universe has its neat teeth snapped clean off, coal black residue of sidereal time, the Doppler EFFECT that takes you through the veil - reality, that shows you the other side of the Diaphane, but also a revolving geometric image, a multiverse in the palm of your hand.

A new creature is on the planet, he is the new master and everything he surveys he owns.

This creature, this illegitimate love child, philosophy's nightmare, religion's downside, the unrecorded LSD trip on a last night in some dimly-lit necropolis at the dead centre of Alpha Centauri. Baconism conquers the Universe in panoplay of regenbogen light and angelic harping. The Devil's big fat ass is kicked. The Devil's big fat ass is kicked, shove off Mr Devil we need Baconism, we want Baconism. We need a new dawn.

Leper Messiah, Napoleon in Rags, clutch of pop idols, shattered shards of song cliches, fragments of overheard, burbling, meaningless speech recorded on the 1000 CCTV cameras and microphones pointed at you as you stroll through the city centre to buy your last toilet roll, your last newspaper. You are the point of an urban myth, a nothing, a pale reflection of the State in its last throes of super-uber paranoia. Its very last territorial pissing.

A new creature is on the planet.

EXCERTED FROM HIS BOOK 'THE TRUTH IS RIGHT OUT THERE' (UNIVERSITY OF NEW DWORKIN, NEW DWORKIN, US), PAUL MURPHY WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE ESTATE OF KEVIN BACON FOR THE LARGE SUM OF MONEY PRIVATELY SECRETED TO HIM IN A BROWN PAPER BAG.

AUTOLYCUS ANTIPASTA

[Mist und Scheiß und Stronzo - three possible clowns]

'Pipesucker?'

Pipesucker glanced down at the gilt-edged letter headed paper on which he had just been writing.


Professor Hiram Q Pipesucker the 3rd
Institute of Anal Discourse
Universtiy of New Dworkin
New Dworkin, USA


'Pipesucker something's come up, new job in Bavaria Ethno-Linguistic mapping; whirr of the air conditioning, intense sunlight, luncheon vouchers, free air tickets.'

Pipesucker glanced around the room. The square tiling seemed squarer than ever before, squarer even than Pipesucker's square head, squarer than Pipesucker's square house, squarer than Pipesucker's square wife, and squarer still than Pipesucker's square dog.
Shadows played in the corner, a young girl, greenlimitline, an old man fiddling nervously with the bratwurst.

'Johnny O right away, anti-semitism conspiracy theory special forces,' replied Pipesucker

Trudging down the lane Pipesucker noticed the blue of the blue sky, the yellow of the radiant yellow sun, the smell of newly cultivated marajuna plants.

A passing blob turned out to be a man.

'Think he's trying to say something.' Mused Pipesucker.

A local growled something in disdainful idiolect.

'My God,' thought Pipesucker, 'this isn't old Bavarian Nostratic, this is de Double Dutch.'


Pipesucker reached inside his tiled sweater grabbing his handbook then spilling his entire pocket contents into a deep ground hole or marajuana plant.

Book. Opened. Pipesucker read the title with pleasurable, cynical rancour.


HOW DE DO DE DOUBLE DUTCH


CHAPTER 1.

The gerund is connected to the infinitive is connected to the dipthong. Put some stones in your mouth and speak as normal....

That's it, he thought, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Pleasure Dome... In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree...instant, powdered ready to serve two shakes of a lamb's tail - de Double Dutch.

Pipesucker had a faint realisation that external reality had existed at some point in the past, and might exist at some point in the future. It was exactly the same with Pipesucker's past. He could
point to the many times and places, to the many moments of note where some decisions were made amongst much that was clearly purely anarchic but his presence hadn't glorified them. He rattled them off, a new found mantra of emptiness; Pearl Harbour, Nha Trang,
Colombia. For all that he had an unbelievable photo album stacked with images of Pipesucker in Special Forces kit condescending to South Vietnamese peasant women, extending his hand to left footed mumbling, grateful Khmer beggars, begging at the feet of
marvellous statues of monkey gods and perfectly enlightened Buddhas. Pipesucker standing in front of (what might be delicately referred to as) antiquities - although Pipesucker hated the word. Pipesucker was so au fe with local custom that he had actually come to believe in the local religions, empathising totally with the feelings of a Cambodian wife and mother who believed that whenever a monkey tipped off a dangling branch or vine the rain and thunder would come. Of this the Vietnamese woman had no doubt, and Pipesucker had come to believe in his own way, that this was also the case although he vaguely compartmentalised such theories as 'schizophrenogenic'. Pipesucker was happy to play along.

The man walked on, passing into the landscape, the landscape seemingly swallowing his tiny figure. Pipesucker imagined a world without destiny, without Pipesucker, but still he couldn’t fathom his own non-presence, the actual effect he had had on events, a very important word in Pipesucker’s lexicon. Existentialism, that Parisian café pseudo-intellectual replacement for thoughts about real, actual, pragmatic, hands on, money making things (the next word in the lexicon after events) had begun to grip Pipesucker. He couldn’t shake off the actual dread that his existence had been summed up, divided, multiplied and finally been crossed out. God was his High School maths teacher, cheerily redpenning every move, every error. Pipesucker had been convinced that his errors were the cheery gateways that geniuses make, but a half nagging doubt convinced him of some other, delicately shaded, monotone, empirical or three-dimensional reality. This was the history Pipesucker evaded, his own history.


AKHENATON

Ridiculous, swept away cold tidal forces, neaptide
Signposts sunken into hollow-faced beaches.
Retort of winds. Patterns of ancient seachanges.
The new order was chill as the sun, yellow,
A punctuation mark pyramid step moment, millenium
Away, your hollow winds, old cheek bones
Mummy cloth, dead fingers on dead hands.
You are the revolution I expected, a slight rebellion
Of leaves then the hush of seagulls to the south.
Are you a word from a dead language?
Or a slight stop on the tongue? A hesitation, a hand
A glimmer in the eye? Your tears, your voice?

GREEK

I won't even forgive you for not spelling 'bird'
It's vogel, you know. We look at it again.
The symbol means nothing. Means lambda.
Bird. Heiroglyph. Crossword puzzle, not poem.
Little philosophy seminar. Not poem. Omeros.
Alpha beta delta ipsilon omokron
Graffiti on ancient tombs 'Rab was here'
'Charlene luvs Pete': toilet humour
taboos, alcoholic morning visions
obscenities, dirty talk. all the Greek is all of you
a duck in the park, a line of sparrows
Dodo walk. cuckoo clock.

THE FLEA

I am the life of a flea - for many years I warmed the bed of my master
Niccolo da Tolentino. Some years ago I was mistaken and inanimate
Until I finally escaped, for at the Battle of San Romano
He shook his head and I dropped into the mud and menure.
I am intoxicated by perspective and the languages of the dead.
I dreaded the dead sounds, I drew inwards and tightened.
I don't want to make out that the lives of such creatures as I
Are exciting or that I illuminated certain aspects of human nature.
All I wanted to do was to survive. I hate death. When I crawled out
From under Niccolo's body I was drowned in paint, I felt pain.
My lungs burst. Now, if you look in my dead eye
You will see Niccolo's everlasting grimace frozen.
My Master, Patrician, Polyarch, Patron, Patriarch - Niccolo da Tolentino.
I felt the immortality of fleas, I will outlast my Master.
Niccolo's interest in the armoury was such
To have no time for fleas. Now he is atomised, fragments persist
But the life of a flea persists. For though he had many fleas
Niccolo's Elmeti, banners drenched in Italian sunlight.
The deadening perspective was my addition.
Because of that I fastened on to this moneybags,
Now I lie dead on the field of San Romano or died afterwards
I am the final Ps, I am drawn in the margin with a red line beneath
Goodbye to my ignorance and to the ignorance of my Master,
Patrician, Polyarch, Patron, Patriarch - Niccolo da Tolentino.