Franketienne - Ready to Burst

A terrifying winged delegation smacks against the trees in an incredible disarray of branches. Green disorder. Instrumental poem of unbridled nature. Musical writing created out of total uprooting. Removal. Amputation of leafy hands. Raging destruction via the injunction of a new language. The winds cough incessantly. Cough up their water-soaked lungs onto the unbolted roofs. The dismantled doors of the heavens vomit up a load of slovenly clouds. In a confused pell-mell. Theatrical inversion of violence. Profound breach. Deafening blare. In a nutshell, an unexpected cyclone. Children cry, collapse in one fell swoop. People are already talking about the number of victims. And the unstoppable winds tirelessly continue their hysterical pursuit.

Painful embrace that lasts six full hours. Leaving insomnia to swell our eyes. Total nightmare. The streets have become hills of mud. Detritus. Rubble. Debris. Ruins. Mobilized volunteers come and go. Help the disaster victims. Aid the wounded.

In a neighborhood that overlooks the city, Raynand hurries. Runs. For the past month, running has become an essential aspect of his existence, as if he were trying to catch a thief in flight, or to capture lost time.

With as much speed as the hurricane, Raynand crosses the streets strewn with puddles and blocked by uprooted trees. In the blink of an eye, he reaches Magloire Ambroise Avenue. Attracted by a gathering of onlookers in a large circle, he comes upon the scene. At the center, two unmoving bodies. Swept up by the floodwaters of Oak Tree River, they’re laid out in a cross. Raynand knows right away who they are: Gordin and Lil’-Pope. Two inseparable hobos. They lived the life of drunken jesters. Everywhere they went they created general hilarity. Lil’-Pope had always been a bum. He got his nickname because of his small stature and slight form. He had a strange and comical way of saying to people he passed in the street: I drink this rum for the fate of my liver and the sake of my faith.

Gordin, at one time a well-respected citizen, had been, before his decline, general director in the Department of the Interior and National Defense. Once very wealthy, he’d spent his weekends in the debauched streets of Batista’s Havana. Collected a fat paycheck but spent work hours majestically motoring about town in a big American car. Caught up in some dastardly crime involving money, he was injected with something by his accomplices to shut him up. An injection that made him crazy. His faculties broke down. Subsequently repudiated by his family, abandoned by his friends, fallen from his pedestal, he landed in the slums of the saltworks. In the most rotten neighborhoods. In the generous arms of Lil’-Pope, who welcomed him. Who continues to embrace him. Even in death.

Pensively, Raynand moves away from the crowd. A deep furrow around his eyes. The final verdict, he thinks. Evil must be tracked down through exorcism. Hypocrisy eliminated. Some new space laid out. Evil brought to its knees. All the magic spells turned away. Right there — that’s the benefit of catharsis. Following the paths of justice in asceticism. Understanding the trajectory of freedom. The profound sense of things. Seize life by the throat. Refuse to surrender. Never lay down one’s arms. Because there’s always a break to solder somewhere. A breach to seal off. A crack to fill in. But what is there for me to learn that I don’t know already thanks to my own antennae? All I have to do now is figure out where Paulin is hiding. Where he could have squirreled himself away such that I haven’t been able to pick up his scent. In what kind of maze? And his novel? The title I’ve found for him.

Higher philosophy of the blade that slices. I entrust my wounded heart to the knowing surgery of the spiders of time. Hands of the clock glide along the canvas of forgetting. Empirical psychiatry. Nocturnal winds brutally read out the sentences of the trees, so sick in their solitude. Anarchic reading. Nothing but a flood of words for so few actions. The river’s source only recounts its subterranean adventures to the discretion of stones. Time thickens into the obscurity of absence under the pricklings of impatience. The itchiness of the soul consumed by desperation. I’m still waiting for someone who never comes back, or who comes back different than I’d imagined. Still, I bless the flight of imaginary fires. I wash myself in my tears. I quarantine my sorrow. And then I attempt to laugh from the margins of myself .

False liberty, the glass defeats the revolt offish in their aquarium. I, for my part, am outraged by the neutral memory of frivolous mirrors and by the blindness of glass walls. I proclaim the power of my eyes over lakes, over the sea, and over all regions peopled by talkative mirrors .

We have lived for so long in a space of darkness that we no longer know the difference between dream and reality, between blindness and sleep. Our eyelids are sewn shut with invisible thread. Offspring with eyeless faces. Neither desiring nor capable of anything, what are we actually worth? We need the light to come, like a brutal army of lancets .

Sound the alarm! Ring the bells. Beat the drums. The storm shows me the depth of the heart. The complexity of life .

Presumptuously, I long took myself for a living god. Beautiful. Terrific. I believed myself to be an irresistible force. Virile stream. Fertile source of light. Powerful wind. Stormy wave churning up the sea. Tossing ships about, leaving wrecks and bodies in my wake. I saw myself as a dense forest. A mountain range. A chain of storms. An earthquake nourishing the veins of the planet with my blood. Avalanche of shattered flint. Burning flame. Devouring mouth. Cutting flash of lightning. Clustering of clouds engorged with rain. Irresistible flood .

For a long time, so arrogantly, I believed I was a magnificent god with the power to single-handedly master the whole of existence. Horrifying solitude! You could even say that I was living nothing more than the weakness and vulnerability of a mere mortal, isolated in his failure. Thus did I learn humility so as to avoid humiliation. I began, painfully, to become a man among men. I suffered. I’m still suffering. But I accept the minuscule existence of drops of water and specks of dust, if they contribute to the growth of the tree. And today more than ever before, recognizing that I am no more than a fragile blade of grass, I shiver like a moonflower hearing the whisper of a nocturnal voice .

The horror gets much worse. Recovery seems far away. Each day reveals new wounds. Life in the affected provinces is a long chapter of human suffering laid out for all to see. Deprived of lodgings, threatened with famine, the survivors of the hurricane anxiously await the aid that sparingly trickles in. Growing worry. General anguish. The situation worsens visibly. Desperately.

Unexpectedly, one Monday morning at dawn, a swarm of blond angels appears in the sky over the country. Wings outspread. Acrobatic feats of tightrope walkers. Graceful arcing swoops. Fascinating aerial pirouettes. The angels touch down lightly, as an invisible choir sings a hymn high above the illuminated clouds. The people, filled with wonder, immediately begin saying that God, in His infinite mercy, has sent his emissaries to help us in our misery. This angelic race, according to public rumor, lives in a very rich country in the northern part of the continent. The people of this race are the earthly representatives of his Lord on High. The benevolent glory of Jehovah. The concern of our Lord Jesus Christ for his suffering peoples. They’d take off any time divine assistance was needed in one of those places hit badly by some plague or another, or if democracy and world peace were threatened somewhere.