Beat the odds.

Beat the crap
Beat the mellow stuff
Beat the odds
Beat the evidence
Beat the mainstream
Beat the flood
Beat the word on the street
Beat the noise of defeat

Beat the times
Beat the city
Beat the so-called winner
Beat the self-grown loser
Beat your fate
Beat the current rate
Beat the average
Beat the common type
Beat the hype
Beat the village
Beat the happy few
Beat the well-born
Beat the bourgeoisie
Beat the labour’s view

Beat the line that’s too easy
Beat the song rhyming cheesy
Beat the fashion
Beat the standards
Beat the grade they gave you
Beat the past you went through
Beat all expectations
Beat all and anyone’s expectation
Beat the wind against you
Beat the heights you once knew

Beat the odds
Beat the flood
Beat the insiders and outsiders
Beat your idea of yourself
And beat your idea of the world

It’s gonna take a lifetime
It’s gonna take a life’s work
Now beat the pavement
Beat your soul down to the pavement

Beat your soul deep down to the pavement



(Tableau : Gustave Courbet – « The man made mad with fear »)

The OK version of yourself

Portrait-of-George-Dyer

The OK version of a song is never satisfying.
When you bring the effort in not screwing it up
Instead of wanting to have it greater,
That’s playing defensive, that’s playing too modest.

Don’t be modest by the way.
If you avoid being pretentious
In rather playing safe,
It’ll always look, feel, or sound a bit restrained.

And the OK version of that song
Becomes a revealing feature
Of how you live your own life,
Scheme your plans, aim the next border, the next chapter,
Trying so hard not to fail
That you never succeed in the end.

If you deliver that OK version of yourself to the world,
Don’t expect any bigger consideration.
The world is not a secret talent searcher.
For better and often worse,
It only pays attention to an edge at the moment,
To a movement or idea so undeniable they can’t wait.
It only shows interest for greatness and stupidity,
Beauty and horror,
Naked truth and gross lies.

Oh wait,
Let’s be fair,
There’s another hook though.
Being awkward, special, unusual, unexpected…
Yet not in a shy way :
See, you can’t just be weird on your own,
It has to mean something.
And it’s not « OK »
It’s not « alright ».
It’s you.

(Painting by Francis Bacon – « Portrait of George Dyer »)

 

Can’t hurt the pain.

Edvard-Munch-Vampyr-II-1896

You can’t hurt the pain.
Can’t make the grief suffer the way you do.
Nor cut a lifeless branch on a weak familiar tree,
Regardless of the shades unrolling over you,
From every last year’s leaf the spring will not renew.
You won’t kill what’s dead already,
Loathe what’s cold or vanished,
What no more will shine.
Even when the old flame surrounds you.

You do not heal,
But never grows the fatal wound,
Wishing you’d turn the stroke of fate
In a violent revenging blow.
By then you point the fist
Against your own shadow,
Unveil a clear target
For those of light beliefs,
Who hardly bare their chest,
And let their feelings go.
You look for mind relief,
In the balance we make
Between beauty and dirt.
Not amongst right or wrong,
Justice and crime.

You’re not the lawyer.
Because you feel, more than you judge.
You get to sense, more than you deem.

Then in the final repentence,
Here is the greatest of your deeds ;
If, as a living remembrance,
You are the one she requested
For the ultimate confidence,
Facing an almost departed.
The hand in debt will cure
What itself had branded.
And you will know the touch,
As you will know your pain,
But then also the prints
From a brotherly chain.
This major human link
Was never born in vain.

So you will have to lend
Your own uncertain hand,
All over bitterness,
Absence and loneliness.
Wide open for a mate
Not to a broken fate,
Not to a shred of history,
Nor a fallen memory.
Not to a leaving rest of life.

For you cannot hurt the pain.
She’ll lift you anyway.

And you shall forgive.

(Tableau : Edvard Munch – « Vampyr II »)

What is lost, and what must be won.

What is lost, and what must be won.
(Photo by Escape Fantasy)

 

Now’s the time for us to accept
That what is lost is better at rest.
In hours and days,
We acknowledge the cost.
Yet how to repay
For what you lack the most,
Why dream you had stayed
In these arms of your host,
When it don’t make a difference,
You’re ten lives away…
It is gone in the distance,
You just followed your way.

Then here comes the time for you to incline
To the feeling of loss
And not having a choice,
Even still it resounds familiar in tune,
And you’ve been here before,
So, you must be immune,
In truth you had more than just no other way,
But you needed to feel it could stop any day.

Now you’re reaching the point
When you’d better assume
How, from this dawn until the last you consume,
All you didn’t once do, as bridges you burn,
All you couldn’t live through, however returns.
It’s your every day’s due, now what must be won.
And no further rescue if damage is done.

Everything gets old nowadays.

Everything gets old nowadays_visual

Everything gets old nowadays.
Aging faster than it used to be,
Or we just felt agreed.
Aging faster from a week to another,
Even from the last till the next hour.
Habits get older as quick as they come,
Our best behaviour tomorrow’s bygone.
In a reset of thoughts do we find a new shelter,
And by playing the ghosts, can we manage to linger.

Everything’s past in a few days,
Whatever the mood, or emotional phase.
It burns out way fuller, blows sooner to decay,
Than it sure would at first or only months away.
And there’s a hunger and thirst always willing to grow ;
Yet the moment it bursts you don’t want it to slow,
Then consume all it’s worth, and now older it shows…

But you know, these days,
Everyone changes anyways.
Faster than a postcard,
Than whatever nice people say.
And there’s a reason your hair would suddenly gray,
Only time is made such a bitter reward,
You wish it never would catch you off guard…

But everything gets old nowadays.
Way faster than it used to,
Or we once knew.
Faster from a dreaming to its nightmare,
From hope to despair.
Until it don’t even seem you just might care.

I didn’t wave goodbye to yesterday,
More, I forgot which was the day.
Don’t know what this life used to be,
The chain is set apart from me.

No word was told, one passed the other by.
Is it too old for us to even try ?
Who’d say hello ? That’s from another time.
The way things go, now’s everybody’s crime.

And life would spin along, just as an endless play,
These years of turning wrong, we knew might have a stay.
I never waved goodbye to yesterday,
It was so long departed anyway.
Nor even cried so much for the old world,
It left too many wishes never heard.

The world is full of good memories.

The world is full of good memories.

The world is full of good memories.
If you just find the one to share with,
Your life’s a functional myth.
And if today’s made of woes or tragedies,
Oh, you just stand by, it blooms in history.
The kind which you remember with heart and dignity.

It may of course not happen in your prime,
Even take thirty years to ring a fonder chime.
Only that’s what you learn anyway :
Sweet memories and good times,
Won’t cover the same day.

The world is full of past unbeaten works,
Of the best ever done job
That could possibly emerge,
And even drawn from yesterday,
Had never gone this relevant.

So if you don’t like these years,
Find another time to get along with,
At least for an hour,
Stop paying attention to all these buzzes going on,
When there’s nothing outthere you aspire to belong.

It may not raise any high hope,
But only if you mistake the praising
Of our finest achievements,
For a stiff rejection of tomorrow’s feats.
When at the end,
What faith or projection might we throw in the future,
Without the remembrance of a nearly perfect day,
An almost ideal song, novel, movie, poem…
Of a near final thought, vision, discovery…
An almost perfect love,
An almost pure living… ?

And the world is full of those memories,
Of our shining pictures in the gallery.
You remember wars, plagues, atrocities,
But they’re only one side of the story.

As the other is filled with reminders
Of whatever great scene early mattered.
Hence if it should be the last reason
That would bring your soul horizon,
If the future seems life prison,
As your days unfold like treason,
Dare refuse the part in your present,
Out of you the past is renascent.

The evening after Christmas Eve

img_5415

I like the evening after Christmas Eve,
When all sort of expectations that pressure anyone’s mind,
Whatever plans they made or dismissed,
Suddenly give way to the most timeless and peaceful night hours
We’ve had for months.

Then we can celebrate not having to show anything
More than respect and love for each other.
Out of any previous tension, longing, and suffering.
Then we could both, or willingly alone,
Or rejoining together,
Fall into an endless winter sleep,
Protected by the harmony of our deep nature,
Secured by the frame of this perfectly non-special evening.

It’s the modest eve,
Now we’re past the big one.
And we might even feel like those children,
Always a bit blue when Christmas gone.
But it’s such pure relief in truth
That our love is beyond complete,
And our bodies shape the most pleasant embrace
We could have dreamed of.

It’s the following night,
Few steps later.
As we gracefully surrender
To the simple joy of being at ease,
Free from the last and next oppression,
From the reign of urgency,
From another case of « do or disappear ».

It’s the evening after Christmas Eve,
And I know it will be gone as well.
And maybe sooner than I wish this year.
But for now let’s pretend
We’ve been touched by magic,
By an unknown blessing,

And we’ll dream the same dream
In a bed of good fortune.

Thirteen years of controversial luck…

13
(a very short essay about lasting in a nothern city)

It was written down somewhere that I’d moved in on the 13th of October.
As it turned out, it was the 14th. Which didn’t make any difference to me.
Still, that would’ve been a catchy announcement :
Thirteen years ago the 13th,
I dropped in this town.

But here we are,
Another year, another round,
Another « how did I get here ? » meditation.
The doors of my own remembrance open in a random way,
They cannot be forced on any special day.

I think I have to go to the agency.
I think I have to take a walk, eventually.
Good fortune,
It always seems like a rainless afternoon.

Maybe grab a cup of coffee, write a few lines,
Shake yesterday off from my instant mind.

The barkeep’s put on a few Birthday party tracks,
Which is pretty bold, perhaps a bit vicious too.
After all, it’s not even tea time.

And he tells me something about a following sport event,
Looking very upset.
There will be tension in the evening,
Trouble on the queue list..
Or maybe none of that,
You never know what to expect.

Like I ever had a quiet night in here…

It’s monday’s twilight approaching,
Filled with the smell of the week-end’s muck.
And I really don’t feel like taking out the trash,
Don’t feel like the story can be summing up.

Thirteen years of controversial luck, I’d say.
Thirteen years of being stuck this way.
Well, It’s not like I really give a f*** today.

We will never stand it.

candle-335965__340

We will never stand it,
The passing of time over grace and goodness,
Over everything truly worth living for.
We will never understand it,
How what was then, can’t be just now,
What once we pledged, we fail to vow.
So we appeal for reason,
When that’s only a treason.

We will never accept it,
But that’s a secret deal we sign,
For the sake of getting by.
It says if you lose memory,
Then you can repel mortality.
At least for a while.
So we lose our memory,
But never gain eternity.

How dare we stand it,
How dare we accept the deal ?
We should mourn every minute,
Every hour, every day,
Every past age,
Every century,
Every dead person,
From the dawn of humankind
To the post-modern society.

Life should be an endless mourning.
We love because of regret,
We expect because of loss,
And because of death, we live.

There must be some kind of justice in nostalgia.
Whereas melancholy, or any bad mood,
Cannot be trusted from an hour to the next.
Nostalgia is cruel, though rewarding in its way.
It’s just that we can’t get over it,
Unless we forget,
Unless we heal,
Unless we behave like this is the first time.

We shoud never stand it,
But we do, or die.