Storyboard for final video project in Time: “La Vie N’Est Pas Une Rêve”
Sound: Jazz Music from Subway performers, narration by Anna Grace of poem, “Sleepless City”.
Sleepless City
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the brokenhearted fugitive will meet on street corners
an unbelievable alligator resting beneath the tender protest of the stars.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of an arid landscape in his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the snow’s edge with the voices of dead dahlias.
But there is no oblivion; no dream:
only flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a tangle of new veins,
and those who hurt will hurt without rest
and those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.
One day
horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.
Another day
we will watch the dried butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a landscape of gray sponges and silent ships
we will watch our ring flash while roses spill from our tongues.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
Those still marked by claws and thunderstorms,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of bridges,
or that corpse who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,
where the bear’s teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the fur of the camel stands on end with a violent blue chill.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
But if someone does close his eyes,
whip him, my children, whip him!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the fake goblets, the poison, and the skull of the theaters.
Poet in New York 1929-1930
Translated by Greg Simon & Steven F. White
