I have something to say, but I don’t know what –
Fifty years ago incandescent graffiti
Were bleached by the morning dew.
The insults stimulated the violence
Of a light boiling with rage
Minimum wage 2.2 francs per hour
Paid vacations in Eure-et-Loire

The Sorbonne crumbles under a rain of steel —
Who can fall in love
With a 5% growth rate?
Vaneigem lets escape from his dark pen
A treatise on good manners
For the use of the young generations,

His mythologized teenage audience
Absorbs the windy spaces of the capital
Forfeited the teleguided figures
Frozen in a haughty economism
Shot down the eagle that subdued idealism
Of its concupiscent talons

Those who make revolutions by halves
Only dig themselves a grave –
And freedom is the crime
Which contains all the crimes
The walls had the word
In a smoky studio of the Beaux-Arts
600 000 silk-screened posters
Hatch in stylized buds in May
On the rain-damaged walls

Under the cobblestones the beach
American way of life, mirages on the fly,
In June in the Luxembourg park,
A young advertising man lights up the night
By lighting a Chesterfield
With a member on strike of the
Republican Security Company

At the other end of the planet
Ho Chi Minh shakes his bloody sky
On the helpless belly of the planet
Dazzled by the incarnate shards,
The rebels bludgeon with their cries
The established authority

The walls have been whitewashed,
The posters disappeared,
The cobblestones have become the sand
Of Paris beach – my city extends its frozen blandness
In July and August history calmed down