Phantomas no. 2, 1954

After years of combing the intertubes we have finally procured this slim volume, the first issue of the long-running (187 numbers in all) artists' journal published after its editors split with Raymond Queneau's Temps Mêles. More important, it contains a "hidden track" in the form of a poem by Marcel Broodthaers that isn't listed in the table of contents and is written under the pseudonym Chateau d'If. The title of the poem, "Adieu, Police!", the content of the poem itself, and the pen name, borrowed from a French prison on the isle of d'If near Marseille, all suggest an idea similar to that expressed by Albert Camus in his novel The Stranger: that imprisonment can liberate the mind. Here's a translation: 

So Long, Police! 
I wanted to be an organ player 
in the army of silence 
but I played hopscotch on the blood-pink dew. 
My ship sank at anchor 
and its rotten wood went up in flames 
at the bottom of the waters. 
So I played zanzi* 
and, from setback to setback,
I arrived at winter solstice. 

I was the scarecrow of commerce. 

The sea took me back 
in the raiment of drowned princes; 
since then all my friends have been seals. 

Then I played poker 
and I appeared running, 
burning my books and friendship 
in the jaws of oblivion 
and, laughing at the crimes of the sergeants and the Bluebeards, 
I became Fantômas. Dressed in water and war, 
I grew up under Paris skies. 

*slang for a game of chance played with three dice