Smooth-cheeked Hooligan
In the Fall of 1879, Rimbaud failed again; feverish, he returned to Roche. Delahaye, who went to see him, reported:
“First I only recognised his so extraordinarily beautiful eyes – with a light blue iris surrounded by a darker ring of periwinkle blue colour. Round in the past, his cheeks looked hollow, squared, hardened. The fresh complexion of an English child that he kept a long time had let place, in that interval of two years, to the dark skin of a Kabyle, and on that tanned skin, new thing which amused me, a fawn-blond beard curled tightly, that was a long time coming – he was going on 25 – like it happens, one believes, to people of a strong race. Another sign of complete physical masculinity, his voice losing the nervous timbre, somewhat childish, that I had known until now, had become low, deep, filled with calm energy” […].
The boy was beardless when he sacked the realm
Of poetry and Paul. Virility
Of vision was required to overwhelm
Wan literati and hostility
To Arthur’s Reign of Terror’s cutting off
The heads of custom’s high-flown writing rules.
Blond whiskers weren’t required, but one brat’s scoff
And a kid’s pigheadedness. Rimbaud’s tools
Were lice and stink in armpit hair and crotch,
Cold words of shit he vomited on verse,
And leaving cum and knife blade’s bloody notch
As components of his witch’s brew curse–
Sex pestled with pride–concocted that drug,
He became a teenage Mr. Hyde thug.