Translated by Elhabib Louai

No, I Have Not Slept

Poem by Mohammed Khair-Eddine

No, I have not slept;

It only took a few police vans

some grenades and some deaf stripes

it took a cop to get into our skins

because I punch your daddy and mine together

Yes

I had to go to the factory for two months

with a fortnight of voluntary absence

I had to catch the king with a red mirror

so that a hint of the night fades and the bourgeois dream

rolls down the slope

but I made a worker worthy of this world

this worker will break the globe in two

so that the earth will no longer be a planet

the dead we relegated to their bones

will gnaw at the rotten death of the bourgeois

and the capitalists who thrash the black-white

who was none other than a worker

shown in such habits

because he loved them, practiced them, kissed the banknote

taken out of a factory safe so frigid

the tangent side of this ordeal will continue to oppose us

But we'll worship it like our ancestors worshiped

God, we will play with our faith, our scythes, our

submachine guns and our planes, but

this world will now be separated from itself

we will be broken trappers but we will overcome

those who have changed their world but not the World

and who explain the blood to us by relieving the earth

of its original mineral cold

From Moi l’aigre (1970), or I, the Resentful, which appeared in two parts: a part in prose which borrows liberally from poetry, and a part in the form of a play. It is a revolutionary work of literature through which the author aspires to be free and spontaneous in tone and form, as illustrated by the rhythm of the author’s “resentfulness.”    

Annigator 

It’s a dream with a Julida’s skin, it straddles me,

bewitches my shadow, it's a flounder, an acrid hip

its blood lays on my sirocco body

on an ashen mouth, on ink

It’s an irreplaceable jet of terror, a drilling bird

with

all the leaves that accompany it in delirium

in the rapids where thunder casts off our skies

It is She who stretches out behind me

this shadow of sketchy obstacles

and Lithobius crawled into my brain

where I shake off stripped stars,

the oblivion of her eyes, it's Her

when I offer myself a night grilled with suns

and words that will shatter your test tubes ion a suspicious day!

From Arachnid Sun, a collection of poems published by Gallimard in 2009.

Memorandum 

Slaves

and circulation of black leeches under my retinas

sun enfeebles your hands in my inaudible blood

and I drink you in a glee of delirium

the sky, accomplice of the beautiful tricks of your uvula

and the frozen-eyed slave who plays the flute

wonderfully in my succinct skins

the unheard-of vices of sirocco

that weave you a sun muzzled with distress

when my catastrophic sperm

stuns your gecko penis

when the wind decrees a faceless insurrection

like an expected immemorial mutiny

the content of Time

cracks in centipede close to the infamous eyelids

of the incandescent estuary

I abjure you - you are cracking the armpits of this people

land of correct oeuvres made of the most riotous harpoon -

sun inscribed on the base of my audacity

your anguish stir resigned patience

freezing even

those iguana rings given that my palm

always carries its antecedent carob

O horses unfrightened

Neither by air nor by the miracle where

our souls marked with the operative seal wriggle

every stone calls for a childhood disaster

last year

I hurt my camel hump

I was bleeding the placenta from these eclipses

but I didn't say

I did not vomit

the word pistol which is not cold in the eyes.

From Souffles Magazine, numéro 1, issue 1, 1966