GEORGES BRASSENS - La mauvaise reputation

Citation qui mérite qu'on s'y attarde

"La loi, dans un grand souci d'égalité, interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain."

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

Burning

"Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned."

Heinrich Heine, poet, journalist, and essayist (1797-1856) 

Vs

"Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over Windows versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs."

Jack Lynch, English professor, author (b. 1967)

At sundown

The calm pounding of the heart
Marching drum
Anger prickling the skin
Like ants
Reminder of the machinery within
The harpoons in the flesh
How befitting the feelings are
To our senses.
The rough textures always
Grate, scrape the eye -
To say the least.
The smell gripped everywhere
The hand stayed at the first touch
Wishing for silence more often than not
For the soothing blanket of music.
Perhaps the taste is the least developed of the senses.
Yet bitterness must still be felt.
_____________

Time wasted in colourless activities.
Observing, witnessing.
Shadows drifting past shafts of light.
Heedless. Terrified to see.
Yet they forgot they were scared.
It is buried deep, deep down.
Luckily for them it will never surface.
They carry on loving, hating, working.
They never open the blinkers
Lest the darkness closes in upon them.
For the darkness lurks.
Its eyes spangles in the night.
_____________

Longing for warmth
A hand
One look
One meaningful look
A familiar smell
An eyelash lost on a cheek
A familiar step
The evidence of the self
An embrace which neither
Pity nor comfort commanded
The possibility of conversation
- However transient -
The luxury of happiness.
______________

Bonding never seemed so hard
The loud crowds
Sniggering
Navel-gazing
Strong, multitudinous
Juggernaut
ready - and perhaps eager -
To murder
Rows and lines are clearly defined.
Pawns cannot look backwards.

Verso-Verso

'Tis like watching another self go about his work. A feminine version of myself. Oddity among oddities. Of all places, of all people.
Mirror, mirror

(22.07.12)

Sense of an ending

Same old, same old.
Love not coming
Stalled, incomprehensible
Present, there.
Not out of reach, but.
That which I already know
Unsatisfying.
How did I come to this?
Like a magnet set exactly
The opposite polarity.
A note of anger,
Unsettled. Unnerved.
Why do I bring this out
In people?
I must have let myself become
The wrong type of guy.
Perhaps I engage too much
In solitary activities.
Perhaps I have lost touch
With whatever life is about.

(06.07.12)

Agôn

Fought Death I have
Though much was destroyed
None was defeated.

(28/02/12)

Back to where we were before we started.

"Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when you were not: that gives us no concern. Why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? To die is only to be as we were before we were born."

William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)

Rainy. Sunday. Afternoon.

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

Susan Ertz, author (1894-1985)