Coco! Green parrot of concierge with gout,
Perched on a paunch, its bilious monologues
Arouse the barks of large and angry dogs,
Make zebras and wild asses dash about.
Nightmare, its black beak plunging in a skull:
Two grains of sunshine under eyeball’s peel
Will bleed at night on a red eiderdown.
A bigot-woman’s love has turned your soul.
Once like a turtle-dove you puffed your neck,
Coco! and noised to equatorial sky
Your tuneful cries that charmed the parrot-hens.
Came sailorman whistling a clapped-out polka,
Came nasty bigot-woman’s frilly bonnet,
The wooden perch inside the gilded cage:
The tropic songs fell silent in your throat.
Exotic nabob of the gaudy hues,
General of empire, showy immigrant,
Weird traveller, to me you represent
A lectern-eagle on a sextant roost.
The cockatoo surveyed the half-done steak,
The parsley and the hotpot and the dark:
A dog disturbed my slumber and the mass
With false alarms of doom, a raucous bark
To terrify the sun and moon and stars.
Coco! a spastic rooster’s strangled cry,
The chickens laughed at it, the flighty dykes:
Ducks, thinking they were swans, emitted quacks.
We longed to drown them in the estuary.
What if he dreams a flag he often sees
Is used to keep the rain off bully-boys,
Whose bunions agonise their beastly toes?
My flags flap loudly on the nightmare breeze.
Coco! Lot’s wife that Sodom turned to stone,
Louche cooks come creeping up, to whittle down
Your effigy for impotent old men,
To spice the odours of their stews and wine.
Coco! Forbidden fruit of Afric trees,
Death’s-heads stove in by jeering chimpanzees,
And still some bygone expedition gulls
Demented monkeys with its polished skulls.
Coco! Small boy, sample this heady brew,
Cocktails and absinthe give the sea their smells,
And lemonades go rolling on the waves:
Mirages are delayed by alcohols:
You will be trampled by hard hooves of bulls.
The moon’s roulette-wheel puts your hopes at stake.
Greeks fixed the planets’ poker-game, it’s fake:
Ancient great minds, like dormice in their burrows,
Spewed hatred at the feet of flesh-procurers.
Maelstroms with jaws shall sweep away the whales
And the white seagulls that monsoons have drowned.
Mountains shall founder in the winter gales,
And dead men’s bones heap up the rolling ground.
The sea shall catch alight, Armadas burn,
Heavy bronze cannon prise apart the flood;
Tossed on the ocean wave, four corks alone
Defy the thunder that the sailors dread.
Coco! The pallid tart whose rouges fade
Sniffed, just this evening, your exotic balm.
She’ll peer through daybreak’s over-oranged shade,
And watch life’s brutishness without a qualm.
She’ll walk wet roads macadamised with tar
Where phallophorias of torches waggle;
Currents caressing North America
Shall waft her neat pirogue without a paddle.
White towers of an ideal Algiers
Shall bend to her their necks like jars,
Pour in her heart that demons nipped
Wild thoughts inside a phial trapped.
On claw-like heels of Louis Quinze she’ll go, raised high:
She’ll disconnect, rip out the eyes of passers-by.
O beautiful necklace my darling
These eyes with their fairy train
O beautiful necklace my darling
These heads without any brain
Our game of cup-and-ball had
Two papier-mâché phalli
Let Judas dance with Pilate
Riquet with Cinderella.
She shall live, shall walk and live,
Eyeing up the golden pile,
Smart boutiques where traders thrive,
Please their clients, daily smile.
She shall live, shall live and walk,
Walk till hospice lych-gates yawn,
Closing cradle, frail pirogue,
Nascent regrets’ last Acheron.
Or in a convent where the nuns are hookers,
Abbess of dark power, will she sell the flesh
Purple with her pubescent sisters’ kisses?
Wrought-iron lantern at bordello-doors,
Courtesans coiffed with hennin of milord,
The past is lulled asleep on beds of whores,
Like a lewd banker whom the pox has gnawed.
St Louis, pensive as a dog on quills:
They loved that steamy street he once controlled,
Toulouse men did. Meanwhile St Merri’s bells
Mixed love-songs with the warning-notes they tolled.
Queen Mary Stuart pleaded to obtain,
Out of an orgiast’s word, Rue Tire-Boudin.
I love them, Rue Tiron, Rue Troussenonnains,
‘Nun Tucking Street’, where at the Sign of the Garter
White-fingered girls turned tricks, with tongues of slaughter.
Hey there! The bar is open, far away,
The wine they vomited last night was red.
Spewing her lungs and ghastly pale today,
The inglorious syphilitic tart is dead.
Let galleon-sails inflate with wind,
For waves have beached on antique strand
Bruised corpses that the shark disdains,
The crabs ate all the lyric brains,
A squid craves twelve-stringed silver tunes,
Bursts a silk bag of loud doubloons!
Fags for the concierge, co-co for the crane.
I shall not sniff the powders that console:
Strong is the opiate my nights exhale,
Hot is the flesh my ravaged hands have torn,
Sanguine and virginal and yet in pain.
Dear poppies, what bouquets in limpid glass,
What Theban ruins, what Byzantine pride,
Dreams crouching by a crowded Bosporus,
Awash with loves all bobbing on the tide.
Coco! my poppy-fields, much more than you,
Perverse and sly, shall make my eyes go blue.
Sodom, Gomorrah! On your rutted plain
I strewed rich salt from the abundant main.
I thought to lay my inner landscapes waste.
Forests sprang up, hid my remains away.
Not three successive lives could have sufficed
To sack that empire, toiling day by day.
Voluptuous and sure is my dream’s poison.
The treacherous drug’s heavy phantasmagoria
Cannot engender in a lucid spirit
The dread of too much love, too much horizon.
Songs conjure, on my journey, all that terror.
Written in 1919, published in 1930.