TALES FROM Café APOLLINAIRE
VARIATIONS ON DISTILLED DREAMS:
A SEASON IN HELL
by Gordon Coombes

Every night at Café Apollinaire

is a season in Hell for some

Rimbaud knew all too well -



The Marquis DeSade tells his tale

of a quarter century in jail

his deeds exaggerated

confusing his fevered imaginings

of sordid collected tales

of mad orgies of flesh eating

of drinking & bathing in human blood-


Classicist & Neo-Classicist

paint pious Biblical scenes

scenes of ancient Greece & Rome

painting the rich & kings

Nobles & the Medici

in a stable in Bethlehem

weeping outside the tomb of the Nazarene

on Golgotha kneeling at the cross-



Bertholt Brecht is busy

organizing the waiters

for a protest for a strike

what the staff here endures

is cruel & unusual punishment

threatening to shoot themselves

in the foot & in the head

" Oh a stage show " someone cries out

" No it's performance art " cries another

everyone cries

into their beer & coffee-


Someone wearing a tall pointed hat

reads a poetic drama

with numerous characters

all with speaking parts

so he gives instructions

" When I raise my left hand thus

for this character

I raise the right hand for this one "

& his right & left leg

for others nodding his head three times

for another & on & on

the dramatist reads twenty more pages

raising arms legs nodding his head

belching coughing farting a few times

who knows what characters these are

no one can keep track anyway

finally finished all tired out done in

taken off the stage on a stretcher

to an ambulance waiting outside

there's always one on call

at The Cafe Apollinaire -



the posing poet pens more lines

stolen from all who come & go

indifferent to their quality

a born thief & a rogue

all of life a preposterous piece of poetry

waiting to be written down -


Camille Claudel sculpts stone into flesh

reveals sensuous flesh in blocks of granite

obsesses over her love for Rodin

reveals scenes of her private life

locks herself away with a hundred cats

going mad imagining enemies everywhere

smashing her statues into pieces -


We hear rumours of a sly misanthropic

fearful would be Jesuit who watches scenes

gruesome & cruel of tortures brutal & ingenious

bodies left to rot in deserted woods

in empty apartments til the stench is overwhelming

shooting beating to death survivors

of a ship wreck watches with delight

a rogue shark tearing apart flesh & limbs

of swimmers having a taste for blood

he sits in the Public Gardens

on sunny sunday afternoons

with a revolver shooting pigeons

watching them wrything as they die-


The xenophobic Apothecary

Thomas Dequincey finding his calling

sets up shop selling raw opium

shares his paranoid racist hallucinations

of the decline of the west

being swamped over-run

infested by the yellow plague

of the teeming masses of immoral

demon worshiping Asians

running amok viewing life as cheap

he fears the lower classes of London

in their impertinence rising up

going beyond their station

destroying the God ordained social order

everyone lines up for their daily supply

buying their Absinthe from Doctor Ordinaire

to add a different tone to their visions

taking cocaine peyote LSD heroin

to blow open the doors of perception-





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NOTE: THIS POEM WAS PROCESSED THROUGH THE REMARKABLE PERPETUAL POETRY GENERATOR

copyright held by MANAGER & PROPRIETOR OF Café APOLLINAIRE!!!!!

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