Letter to his Wife
They suffered from a passion like their loins
Ripped open, full of pain, and gushing life
Out like the plastic chips, the bastard coins
(More costly than the infant Paul or wife)
From this combined Las Vegas slot-machine
Affair. The older one, besotted, searched
For images extreme enough to mean
How much his heart heaved, how his deep guts lurched
Once Rimbaud entered Paris, entered him.
This boy screamed yellow notes, a male banshee,*
A sado-masochistic centered hymn
With stripes. One poet’s feral pen moved. “We,
We have the loves of tigers,” Verlaine wrote.
Each man became a clawed off entrecôte.