The Pendulum Chilblains

 

by Walter Ruhlmann

 

 

 

 

#1

 

Just the transparent atmospheres to make me nebulous, shivering, excited. 

 

One night of off season I met sulphur and suffering.

 

Botanizing the night suns, midnight and the moon restored the lost love hibernating in the fantastic caves.

 

 

#2

 

The delicate hours offer terrible frame sets to appease their phantasms and to defy the gods.

 

Growing, the nights derive along the blue channels and the limpid currents fluctuate according to the body battles.

 

The winter rushes on the shivery gold that the hopes offered us and our eyes focus on only one target on which neuralgic tiredness settle and grow.

 

To wait no more and to confess one’s desires.

 

 

#3

 

To deliver the lanes from this evil by attracting it far from the blue eyes and still to be used as a bait.

 

A pot of clay broke and on the ground lie its remains.

 

The rain seals the secret thirsts and rebellions.

 

In the hands, naked and damaged by the white frost, the shivers of the destroyed angel sleep.

 

Putridness of the spirit, constraint of the body and in a dash of fear the wings of the angel grow again so that he can be freed once more.

 

 

#4

 

The days pass without a noise and their torrid silence calls in crime, with this feverish imagination.

 

Another step within cruelty and sweat is erased.

 

Hours of constraint, the world collapses under the fibres of the hunger, this regime of misfortune and fear.

 

Welcome!

All leads us to the suffering.

 

 

#5

 

I AMNESIAS

 

Black hole

lapse of memory

extra nothingness  and nothing in extra

encircle amnesias.

 

 

II TURPITUDES

 

To bore the secrecies of disgrace

and to lighten one’s spirits full of sulphur by opening one’s veins

to pour a rotten blood on the pure whiteness of the good.

 

 

III NAIVETY

 

To let oneself believed and fooled by words without degree.

To leave on the back of the blue clouds

and never go down again without having low spirits

to fall indefinitely into the traps of the words distorted by desire, selfishness and sadism.

 

 

#6

 

Virtual paradise, will you take us far from the pangs?

 

Venom of this fabulous dragon that is being breathed out in our veins, the pieces of transitory ecstasy dig tombs and build the vaults.

 

Nightmarish, Dantesque and without exit, the brown poison gives us thirst and pushes us to the crime.

 

Sweetened odour, acidulous, the evil spell can charm us.

 

 

#7

 

Under the doors of the night sleep the blue nuances which bury wintry weathers and are like jails to the low spirits.

 

And the serene wolves devour the bloody flesh of the last comers.

 

Until the next stage the night will remain whole and under the celestial domes it will drink the dizzying wine with us.

 

 

#8

 

Satin moods, scents of cold and wet winter.

 

Sources of terrifying shivers under the frozen floods of these enchantments.

 

And in the fixed sky all the tears appear and penetrate in the cracks of difficult passion.

 

To stagger in the mysteries of the sources of the cold.

 

 

#9

 

The sun makes the pretences of happiness gleam and all courage is lost in the bliss but will our hearts be heated one day?

 

We had seen the calmness of the bewitching paradises, but deaf to the songs of the pagan natives, our red vouges poured blood on the ground blessed by nature and our hurricanes of iron vomited all the fire hidden in them.

 

In the name of the infidels, we massacred the happy ones and the sulphur mixed with saltpetre meant well to make us dream, but we only collected the anger of the masked avengers striking down our disastrous roofs and condemning us to exile.

 

Now that the drawers open and let escape the phantoms and the evil torments, we are left to heal our pendulum chilblains.

 

 

#10

 

A DAY OF PEPPER

 

Sneeze in gilded sands, delirious secrets of a boy lying on a bed of passion and disillusion.

 

Prickly scent of the crowned spice which makes up in the twisted rooms and sends the bodies to be cooked on the bloody communion pyres.

 

The dogs run after each other in the streets of Death and the gipsies show us their hands to read in ours and discover the tortures.

 

 

#11

 

Laws of fear,

of our in-coldings, long living and hateful.

 

Let them flee us so that the sweet spirit is released and remains far from us for his safety.

 

Tired of the long road which carries it out where nothing dies no more, where nothing suffers no more

and where the furious men are expelled under penalty of ending in broth, the serene, sweet spirit devours the existence and the children with tender flesh.

 

 

#12

 

To smell the refrigerated savours of the past and to feel the ice-cold water of an sweetened night on our skin,

singing the pleasure which makes us quiver and fidget

 

To cross the years within a phantasm which takes us all our free time and to lose freedom, independence in the arms of desire.

 

To shout our pleasure and to let escape the hot venom which will appease us. 

 

 

 

 

The Pendulum Chilblains — 1995.  (Translated 2006, corrected 2011.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walter Ruhlmann was born in 1974 in France.  He currently lives in Mamoudzou, Mayotte where he works as an English teacher.  Walter lived in England from 1995 to 1997.  He began publishing Mauvaise graine, a literary magazine, in 1996, now known as mgversion2>datura.  Back in France, he has carried on publishing and writing mostly poetry, although he has published short-stories in several French-language magazines.  He is the author of several poetry booklets and has published poems in Magnapoets, Poetic Diversity, Aesthetica Magazine, Ygdrasil and Above Ground Testing.  He co-edited and translated poems for the bilingual free verse and form section for the anniversary issue of Magnapoets in January 2011.