Death sacrifice arpeggio locality not to go where you have to go not to be whom you must be not to think not to know not to forget not to lie not to understand not to fall vertigo not not to fall trying to stay balanced on the balcony between two worlds as on a tomb between two worlds in balance not falling not finding the void under your feet not speaking to the void I cannot tell the void how much we suffer we suffer from what we suffer from ourselves we suffer from others I glued the stars to the ceiling I ran to the fish stalls and I watched them shine and I leave them watch them shine in the night each star had a name each star has something of me in its flesh in my flesh you must not fall on the path the path that leads from one point to another and which always comes back to itself this path you have taken it thousands of times thousands of times you had to come back to yourself you came back to watch yourself die and be born and to die and to die you came back to see faces that you had not seen for so long that they seemed to be carved on the stones of the tombs these images which surround you hardly have any more names which are part of your past these images of flesh these faces of flesh these bodies without flesh those are the skeletons hanging in the attics that when the wind blows start dancing in the void suspended by ropes that’s the dance of the skeletons that’s the dance of the dead the bones bump into each other in such a way that after a while you no longer know which skeleton belongs to which body and it doesn’t matter you vaguely remember the time of your childhood when you weren’t a man anymore a man not yet a man not yet a living being but you never became a living being you never became yourself you vaguely remember your father you vaguely remember these traces that remain in your memory that no longer correspond to anything because you are no longer anything because you have ceased to be and to think to love you have ceased to be able to know you have ceased to want and soon you will have to suddenly disappear as if erased on the blackboard of the mind suddenly you will fall into oblivion on the tombstone and under the stone there is a staircase always the same take the same staircase which leads to hell but hell is at the surface we already live in hell we are dancing skeletons tied to the ends of ropes in an attic that the mice that pass through the attic on the parquet floor don’t even see so busy trying to survive little gray mice trying to eat and we don’t matter to them at all.

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Ivan de Monbrison is a French poet, writer, and artist born in 1969 in Paris, he currently lives in Saint-Mandé, France, near Paris. His poems or short stories have appeared in several literary magazines. Eight poetry chapbooks of his works have been published: L’ombre déchirée (1995), Journal (1997), La corde ànu (2000), Ossuaire (2009), Sur-Faces (2011), The Overflowing Body (2018), Irradié (2020) and La Cicatrice Nue (2020). His novels include: Les Maldormants (2014), L’Heure Impure (2016), Orgasmes et Fantaisies (2016), Nanaqui ou les Tribulations d’unpoète (2017), Le Vide Intime (2020).