Thoughts on Costa Brava: Tourist Guide, 1951

Thoughts on Costa Brava: Tourist Guide, 1951

I. Costa Brava Today

Here’s to the light and millenary youth but where hide they

Why skip they the shore for the secular show in cadaqués

Under the lost columns of the temple of hermes health-giver

Smuggling tons of moroccan hash wrapped in the roughest

Burlap bags hundreds of cleverly shaped bag tricks to fool

The duane at the french border ’cause it’s hard to bribe a frog

These days into believing you’re transporting loaves round

Loaves shaped like catalan stocking caps or piles of excrement

Left by the catalan pooper all along the border marking space

Marking time until the tramontana roars again scattering hope

Of independence chasing the bones of the retirada and dalì

And all the troubadours and smugglers more famous even

Embracing all the nice emotions while running the naturist

Beaches from l’escala to roses like no other in the world.

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II. Savage accidents

Here’s to the light and millenary youth why spend

Your rich scale of neat emotions at the sex shop

At la jonquera inhaling exhausted air while hoping

For a glimpse of sirius rising out of the sea

Beyond roses while licking petrocarbon

Grime and chump-change freixinet cava

Off the slime-dulled tile floor why fall down

When a rich scale can calibrate the love

And all those neat emotions dread fear lust

Anger despair in the sea-by secular forgotten

You happy accident savages and nice kids

You turn blue and rough by turns in the sand, oh.

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III. Costa repressed

Oh light and millenary youth over half a century back

Dreaming of a thousand to line the shore of the empordà

And scanning the choppy sea for sails and cornucopias

But what of the light and millinery imps those rascals

Because that’s how it read the first time and the second

With uncanny dalì wigs and hats soaring angels willow-thin

Skeins of nice dread and joy tingling the costa’s sixty miles

Of rocks and sands whoop-tee-doing all ecstatic brazen

Then slapped down by some functionary in barca

Bare walls peeling greeno paint tarnishing his alien skin

His worn red stamp pad snarled rewrite, reject, submit

In the name of the people and their god the fingered

Frank oh from beyond the frontiers

Oh no happy accidents on the coasta these days

Only certain savage rough collisions.

No nice blue propaganda permitted here

Not yet

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