Arthur Rimbaud, Lucien Létinois, Frédéric-Auguste Cazals
The decades wane away and Verlaine hears
The man in Africa expressing in
His silence what he said to Paul those years
Ago when he in melancholic sin
Repented in a Belgian prison. “You,
Little poet of straw, chasing bad rhymes
Is all you do. The prison that you grew
Yourself will cage you in, in all the times
To come, the bars you built rejecting me,
Your only hope. You could have been my dog
And learned new tricks. Your serendipity
From kicking me is rhyme, rhyme, rhyming fog.”
Paul listens to these prophecies received
From silence, feeling druggily aggrieved.