Léo Ferré - Rimbaud - The sitting ones

Original Title: "Les Assis"
Text: Arthur Rimbaud
Year: 1964

Black with wens, pockmarked, eyes rimmed of rings
Greens, their curved fingers clutches at their thighbone,
The sinciput planted with vague spitefullities
Like the leprosian blossomings of old walls;

They have grafted, in epileptic loves,
Their whimsical skeletal structures with big black skelettons
Of their chairs; their feet to the scrawny rungs
Intertwines for the mornings and the evenings!

Those old men always have braids with their seats,
Feelings the vivacious suns percalise their skin,
Where, eyes at the window where the snows wither,
Shake of a painful shake of the toad.

And the seats are very kind tor them: mellowed
with brown, the straw breaks at the angles of the small of their back
The soul of the old suns lights up, wrapped up
In those braids of ears where the grains were fermenting

And the sitting ones, knees to the teeth, green pianists,
The ten fingers under their seat with rumors of drum,
Listen to themselves lapping some sad baracolles,
And their heads are going in some love rolls.

- Oh! Do not make them stand up! It's the wrecking...
They spring up, rumbling like slapped cats,
Opening their shoulderblades slowly, Oh rage!
The whole of their pants puffs out at their bloated waist

And you listen to them, banging their bald heads,
To the dark walls, planting and planting their crooked feet,
And the buttons of the outfit are fawn eyes
Which catch your eyes from the back of the corridors!

Then they have an invisible hand which kills:
When they return, their gaze filter that black venom
Which loads the suffering eye of the beaten bitch
And you sweat, caught in an atrocious funnel.

Seated back, fists drown in some dirty cuffs
The think about those who made them stand up
And, from dawn to the evening, clusters of tonsils
Under their puny chin stir to the point of bursting.

When the austere sleep has lowered their peaks,
They dream on the arms of their fertilized seats,
Real little loves of seats on the edge
Through which proud offices will be lined with;

Some ink flowers spitting pollen in commas
Rocks them, along long squatted chalives
Alike to the threads of gladioli the flight of the dragonflies
- And their limbs excites themselves to beards of ears

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