Some readers may find parts of this sonnet sequence about Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine offensive.  If you think you may be offended, please do not read it.  Thanks.

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

  Bleu, Blue, and Black

 

 

 

Foreword

 

    The Poet’s Wish

I’ll craft a sonnet so destructive that

The universe’s laws will reach their halt.

The heart line of the cosmos will go flat.

Catastrophes surrounding Ararat

Will be like rules, as dead as Sodom salt.

I’ll craft a sonnet so destructive that

Its force will petrify the flying bat

And turn earth’s forests into fungal spalt.

The heart line of the cosmos will go flat

Like earthquaked pyramid and zigguarat.

With rhythmic, rhymed, rhetorical assault

I’ll craft a sonnet so destructive that

Its jolt will be like the suicide splat

Of asteroid joined with tectonic fault.

The heart line of the cosmos will go flat

When quatrains and the couplet acrobat

Their fatal tae kwon do-chop somersault.

I’ll craft a sonnet so destructive that

The heart line of the cosmos will go flat.

 

On a Leash Rimbaud remarked, “Dogs are liberals,” to Gastineau, the Mautés’ loving dog. A “doll-faced” time bomb ticked away with blue, Blue eyes, light blue and deep, until the fog Of future London filled that Paris home. He was an Ostrogothic army in The rues, the Vandals in the streets of Rome, An islamist’s device of bolts and sin. He started off by breaking bric-a-brac, And hacking at a Jesus Christ, pale God Of ivory, ending up with total sack Of marriage.  He rode everyone roughshod And then when he retreated from the fray, He took his man, the husband, far away.               Husbandry Much more than my heart stutters when you hold Me holy in your arms.  When your arms grasp My chest and clasp me to you, when they mould Me, fold me to your love, throat and lungs gasp. My tongue would stammer if it could, but it Is mastered by your tongue to silent bliss. Your strong embrace makes feeble falterings fit Together as they wait to feel your kiss. Much more than time collapses in a writhe Of spasms.  Days and nights all disappear In fleshy harvestings.  Your manly scythe Turns mere eternity into a smear. And when you plant your seed inside me, terse And final, comes the staggering universe.

An Alabaster Submarine: 
A Shakespearean Sonnet by Paul While They Lived in London but Accidentally Misplaced by Arthur

Recently Discovered and Englished by Phillip Whidden

The Gospel of Saint Luke 7:36-50

A submarine cathedral is the place
Where I was forced to keep you all those years.
I thought that I would sacrifice that space,
My love for you, but frankincense and tears
Can’t burn beneath the waves. It’s true of course
I didn’t even know that you would write
That letter to me and enclose that force,
Your poetry, a proof so strong in might
That it would raise the sunken vessel from
The seabed, light Elijah’s bonfire on
The altar, striking normality dumb.
It was a fiery death and also a dawn.
Your eyes are a delicious blue, two stabs
Of blue that once were buried in among black crabs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I  A Bleu, Blue Boat

1

    Two One-way Tickets

One way.  The other way.  The other way

For Verlaine, maybe.  Leaving wife and child

And not just Belgium, Verlaine chose the gay

Abandonment of married life and mild

Hours pushing a perambulator

Through Paris parks and Sunday luncheon food

With in-laws, threw up being a pater,

Abandoned all for being sweatly lewd

With boy poet, Arthur.  They bought two

One-way tickets, Ostend to Dover.  Why?

It wasn’t a  romantic gesture.  Sous

Were scarce.  The two simply had to get by.

..But maybe love involved itself in this

….Decision.  Maybe they believed in bliss.

2

 

Not Nearly Twenty Thousand

     Leagues across the Sea

Two poets took a science-fiction trip

Together, leaving sonnet Europe for

Modernity in London.  Comic strip

Futurity of hardness spread before

Them: coal fed dragons belched out smoke and fire

On rigid iron tracks and on a bridge

Of cast iron these monsters lumbered their ire

Above those men, these lovers on the ridge

Between the heavy alexandrine verse

Of centuries they had left behind and rash

New shockingness.  The old became a curse

In sex with painful gravity and brash

Lines staggered like veins in throes

Of drug withdrawal death, like crazy prose.

3

       Saturday Night, September 7

    and Sunday, September 8, 1872

                                   “the seven or eight hours of a rather rough crossing”

                                                         “night when we landed”

                                “On the following morning we wandered through the town,

                                              with the sun shining brilliantly overhead”

 

The watery flight from Europe in a storm

Of seasickness ended in a yawning

White-cliffs town.  An English dawn held to form

With sunshine spread across the day.  Dawning

Escarpments made of blinding chalk only

Increased in brightness of prime British hours

Which probably seemed to banish lonely

Lives.  Fled from France and holy powers

Of matrimony and the Roman Church,

Just who would choose to run to London while

The year began to turn into the lurch

Of fall and all things wintry, dark, and vile?

..Two men.  Two poets.  Lovers, young, nor old.

….Why shouldn’t this first Sunday make them bold?

4

O, Liberté, que de crimes

on commet en ton nom!

 

What sought they thus afar?

Bright jewels of the mine?

~ Felicia Dorothea Hemans

The others on the ferry, churned up by

The night-time sickness of the waves, just

Might have been too weak to want to eat.  Bi

Verlaine and gay Rimbaud were full of lust

For life, though, setting about the Sunday

“mediocre town” of Dover to find

Some tea and eggs.  They wanted a fun day,

This first of theirs in Albion.  No blind

Obeisance to Sabbath’s stiff attitudes

Surrounding them would ruin their pleasure.

They climbed the threatening cliff attitudes

And leaned towards what they sought.  They sought deep treasure.

..What sought they thus so near to France’s shores?

….They wanted liberty, these rhyming whores.

5

 

         Two Symbols

Two symbols could not be much more unlike Each other, one of softness in an arc, The other of right angles, death and spike, The rainbow—sweetness—and the cross, like shark Its style.  The bending bow that Rimbaud thought Of on the ferry seems divorced from sin; The torture instrument he thought of, fraught With agony, iniquity and twinLust martyrs, rose up linked to Jesus’ blood.Bloods clasped their closer blade and screwing spree.The rectilinear was like a bud Of bluntness, and the arch, serenity. ..Calm seas, calm lives, calm love were not their aim. ….They wanted heat and pain and nothing tame.

6

 

      The Imperial Prince

The poème Rimbaud wrote in London first

Was homosexuel and harking back to France,

To dirty Zutistes things, to the accursed

And filthy habit, taking out of pants

The Prince’s Thing, royal masturbation

Where Louis was in Chislehurst in Kent.

The poet uses imagination

To paint His Royal Highness jaded, bent.

Inside the rhymester’s profane mind there lies

A picture of the Prince’s face, the worse

For wear from wanking bags beneath his eyes.

This shows the puerile filth of Rimbaud’s verse.

..The poem turns the ange into a hole,

….Presumably for Rimbaud’s top-boy rôle.

 

7

 

Homosexualité was linked to loneliness,

A sickened solitude and to a failed

And fallen dynasty.  Rimbaud was less

Than grown up when he wrote this final, nailed

Down poem:  it turned out to be the last

Traditional creation (in its form)

He ever wrote.  He thought he was the blast

That would replace the ordinary norm

Of verse.  Attacking royalty and all

It stood for, he, nonetheless, still re-used

The ancient tricks.  He wanted to appal,

And didn’t care how many he abused.

  He conceived himself an empire buster,

….But showed himself a teenaged, silly luster.

8

      

                Action Man

“Action is not life, but a way of wasting a kind of strength.”  ~ Rimbaud

No matter what the action is, Rimbaud?
What if the act is making love?  I don’t
Mean lacerating chests or hands, but, no,
The feeling other people breathe, who won’t
Think loving means a wounded palm or wrist,
Who smile that love is when a mother bends
To serve her child or when a boy is kissed
By Daddy in the evening cot, who sends
The lad to dreams that you could never know
In London or in Europe, or in guns
You ran in Africa.  Is prayer a glow
Of acts when sisters plead for benisons
On mean and monstrous males, or when mild wives
Wait, faithful to their men of wastrel lives?

9

              Time Travellers;

            The Alexander of

                Stately Verse

“To cross the Channel was to travel” years,
Five decades, far “into the future,” says
One writer of their journey.  Pioneers
They were, poetic versions of Cortés
But bound for Britain.  Rimbaud’s first attempt
At poetry in England was the last
Old-fashioned verse he wrote. His wild contempt
For everything, including love, was vast.
Technology was far advanced where they
Arrived and David Livingstone the man
With posters of his exploits on display.
Rimbaud destroyed the alexandrine with his van.
..There might as well have been no past, so far
….As he cared.  Demolition was his star.

10

Love is a Foreigner Who Can’t Rhyme Properly or Get the Scansion Right

From Rimbaud’s stormy crucifix and bow
The spondee-footed travellers progressed
By train to Charing Cross.  They walked below
A sky of lead through London.  Its crowds pressed
Too close with gin-pale breaths, not anything
Like absinth or red wines of the Rhone.
Paul did not recognize the auguring.
Both didn’t sense it in the gut or bone,
But they were lost so far as love could lose
Them, one fanatical about the dugs
Of poetry, the partner drowned in booze
And sex and other kinds of deathly drugs.
..These two bizarre crossed lovers where we lay
….Our scene were driftwood love’s far-fetched cliché.

11

 

     A Very Bulldog Welcome

The day Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine arrived Together, London was in lovely light. At least it should have been.  The sun, deprived Of autumn glory, cringed from urban blight. The coal-fire chimneys’ vileness forced Verlaine To write, “Imagine seeing sunbeams through Gray crêpe .”  French yokels, both were staggered when They saw the crowds.  In their poetic view It seemed to “have been snowing negroes.”  These Two explorers learned how shallow was their Importance by shop windows’ obsequies To Livingstone (with lice-less hero hair).These ultraviolet poets tucked their rags Around themselves and moved like stumbling stags. 12 Beyond Empire’s Docklands When Britain led the world in child abuse In factories and in prostitution streets, Two poets, lovers weaned from their chartreuse Addiction, had to settle for small treats Like beer.  The two were starving, nearly, in The filthilopolis beneath the cast Iron bridges and among the loudmouthed, gin Besotted Brits.  The place itself was vast But people were emaciated, small, And skinny –and especially the poor. The city showed its splendor in its sprawl So distant from le café raconteur. ..Their darkened lines and loves were small and large, ….Laid down for our tomorrow—their depth charge. 13   The London fog was lush, more lush than French Fogs anywhere, more plush than Paris fogs At least.  It bordered on the louche, its stench A prophecy of LA’s stringent smogs. Verlaine remarked that London’s murk was worse, That Leicester Square’s pollution was more dull Than Paris’s, more like a sickly curse, More like contamination of a skull And crossbones sort.  But he and Rimbaud found A hideout in this Camden camouflage Wrapped round them as a blanket to confound Their pasts.  It made a misty, distant cage Aux folles for them away from sanity. It gave them space for their humanity. 14      Rimbaud in Camden                  “an angel in exile” ~ Paul Verlaine Imagine then an exiled angel.  How Would he appear, this creature, if he were More real than metaphor?  His lids would bow Down over such blue eyes with eyelash fur That azure would become ashamed to show Itself in any other place except the sky Above Jehovah’s throne in Heaven.  Snow Would never fall again before an eye As sovereign as this one archangel.  Cloud Would be forbidden by the Christ to hold Those irises unveiled.  A poet proud Of poetry would keep the color cold. ..The wings, a cobalt blue, if they exist, ….Would shine like sapphires in a shrieking fist. 15 Absinthe-minded Charlatan      “The most curious thing about the transformation of the sensorial apparatus—the phenomenon, at least, that struck me most forcibly in the experiments I conducted on myself— is that all sensations are perceived by all senses at once. My own impression is that I am breathing sounds and hearing colours, that scents produce a sensation of lightness or of weight, roughness or smoothness, as if I were touching them with my fingers.”    ~ a French doctor writing about absinthe in the year that       Verlaine and Rimbaud moved to London   “the honey-voiced sirens” ~ Homer, The Odyssey How boring that these poets after all Weren’t geniuses, but only addicts knocked About inside their skulls.  Rimbaud and Paul Found out, brainlessly, that they could concoct With chemicals odd words and phrases that Were unexpected.  Now synaesthesia Had been around since the Iliad at Least.  (Paul’s wormwood slopped to anaesthesia In later decades.)  The arrogant boy Thought he’d created something wholly new, Ignoring the fact that his druggy ploy Turned poetry to troubled prosy spew. ..Paul embraced the boy’s grandiloquent fiction. ….Poetry suffers still from the affliction. 16    “L’allée est sans fin” ~ Verlaine What kind of place is fit for hommes who want To make a London nest together, one Where poetry is brooded, a romaunt Perhaps, or maybe some phenomenon Of love unheard of till they break fresh ground Of ache, and joy, and verse.  Behold, a new Creation soaked in alcohol is found Inside their room which, smelling like a zoo, Will linger as a palace made of sweat And agony and ugliness—and sweets Which no one else has tasted, this place set In infamy and history that Keats Could never have experienced.  Their thighs And tongues sought everything that stupefies. 17            The Shining While Arthur wears a top hat, Paul has shoes Shined—nothing here of poetry.  A pipe Pollutes the air, unpoetically.  Booze Ain’t that poetic either, both guys ripe With body odor.  Try to write some verse With immortality on that.  Still it’s only 10.  Things could be decidedly worse By midnight.  Then they could both be lonely, One left behind, penniless as a rat, The other on a boat to Belgium and Doomed.  That’s what happened.  Rimbaud’s lines went “Splat” Cartoonishly and Verlaine’s life went bland When prison ended.  There on Cannon Street They didn’t know their lives would turn to bleat. 18 The Autumn Sings Exhilaration “Scarcely sad the autumn seems Gently recurring”  ~ Paul Verlaine, “La fuite est verdatre et rose,” Romances sans paroles The autumn sings exhilaration through Its own potential sadness.  This time fall Is focusing on frantic leaves and blue Of sky so bright the season would forestall All death, especially the death of love. My man is here beside me in my bed, Beside me as we write our lines above The poetry and music from the head, The poetry from marrow, semen, blood And Northern Lights.  My hand composes blond, Pale, blue, and comet sounds.  His stuff is thud And butchery—and everything beyond. ..This autumn will be infamous and wild ….In stanzas and our passions now reviled.

 

by phillipw | Aug 6, 2020 | Uncategorized | 0 comments