The Forgotten Madmen of Ménilmontant by Frank Stanford

<p>Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman</p><p> </p><p>The Forgotten Madmen of Ménilmontant</p><p>after Jacques Prévert</p><p> </p><p>Do not look sadly at days gone by</p><p>days below days like a river running under the stars</p><p>Do not listen to the blues</p><p>or speak often with priests</p><p>Do not think the rich women enrolled in the college of nightfall</p><p>will always smell the same way</p><p> </p><p>Everytime the tree works the leaves dream</p><p> </p><p>Everytime I carve the dead wing my name</p><p>in the dark lamp of the outhouse</p><p>I said everytime I cut my name</p><p>in the old wood rotten as a tugboat</p><p>I know I am always with you</p><p> </p><p>Everytime the schoolboy’s bad moon</p><p>dowses blood from the virgin’s stone thighs</p><p>I know I am handsome and young and drunk</p><p>eternal as a weed</p><p> </p><p>It will not smell the same</p><p>Everytime I open a bottle of wine</p><p>and see a snake doctor under my bed</p><p>I know there is something coming and eternal</p><p>like taking off a white coat over the body of the dead</p><p> </p><p>Poets have done this before</p><p>Poets have made love and gathered at the cheap joints</p><p>they’ve cut their fingers toasting one another’s death</p><p> </p><p>Poets have made love</p><p>and remained thick</p><p>they’ve gotten cold feet at the crucial moments</p><p>when left alone with the students with sad eyes</p><p> </p><p>Do not die in the wintertime</p><p>for there is no okra or sailboats</p><p> </p><p>It will not smell the same</p><p>that twig of blood or the chiffonier</p><p> </p><p>Do not listen to hunting dogs in autumn</p><p>or tie yellow flies for the small lips of desperate friends</p><p> </p><p>Poets have done this before</p><p>and they’ve wandered off alone and unheard of</p><p>to bury the caul of their own stillborn</p><p> </p><p>Like a voice the odor has changed</p><p> </p><p>Dust under the hooves of a horse</p><p>running side by side with the fog</p><p>a book in the hands of a fool</p><p> </p><p>Cheese and fish and spinsters<