Noise Poem by Philippe Beck

Evening makes a fire.
Day fades. Gone melancholy.
Man and woman weave
joy and movement,
and the life of a child in the walls.
Paradise is elsewhere.
But a child
is of paradise as idea.
Active wish in the bedroom.
Or the speaking Room.
Child is there.
Syllable-idyll.
Tom Thumb lives
by his limbs,
that is, the brain.
Mind is a limb.
Child inhabits sometimes the ear
of animals
and steers them.
He imitates them.
He is also the voice of noise.
Spreading fear among the
bad men.
They flee in terror.
A voice
clothes the earth.
Little man sleeps on straw
or in an old shell.
Worth the world's weight in gold.
He is forbidden the light dance of steps.
Destiny of a fairground freak.
Ordained thus.
He leaves.
And lives, despite himself,
not in the belly of whale
or shark,
but of a cow,
and uncandled.
She provides an ample and circular
cover, undergoing slow
digestions.
There are no flying boats.
Cow ploughs the earth
in her manner.
Whale enters the material
unconsciously.

He has slept in the hay.
A magnetic sleep.
Away from mechanical marriage rites.
Day has whitened.
The cow has taken him
in her stomach.
She is his night refuge.
Sun is without.
Sun Unfazeable.
It gives Main Heat
and Organs.
It mimics the unconscious cow.
She, with her circular nape.
She who triggers a curiosity.
A puppet?
Accused
like the Greek rock?
Cow is inverted glory.

Tom leaves his night refuge.
Refuge of night and covering.
Wolf eats in the Round
and gobbles Tom too.
Wolf is the new provisional house
of a little man
who dances with energy.
He dances out of Attention.
It makes a sound.
Attention-Dance.
Father wakes up.
Opens wolf's stomach.
With profane scissors.
In the open, child of
character he bawls.
He is bound tight
against hearts.
He has traversed the wind.
Canal of ruins.
Hippity-Hoppity.


after ‘Tom Thumb'