Bleu, Blue, and Black:   

                                A Sonnet Sequence

 

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

WARNING:  Some of the sonnets in this sequence may be very offensive to some readers.  Some are sexually explicit.  Some may offend in other ways.  Do NOT READ any of these sonnets or look at their pictorial illustrations if you think you may be offended.  If you read them and  IF YOU FIND ONE OR MORE OF THE ITEMS OFFENDS YOU:

1.  Do not complain to the sonnet writer or to this website.  You were clearly advised;

2.  Do not comment on them using this website’s comments mechanism.  You were very clearly advised;

3.  Do not complain anywhere else.  You were warned.

If you like them, tell other people about them, please.

 

 

Foreword—

a villanelle and sonnets before the sonnet sequence begins

 

   The Poet’s Wish–a Villanelle

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 streets, the Vandals in the rues 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 arms, yours, grasp My chest and clasp me to you, when they mold 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 of delicious blues, 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 “father,” maybe.  Leaving wife and child

And not just Belgium, Paul V. chose the gay

Abandonment of married life, those mild

Les heures pushing a perambulator

Through Paris parks and Sunday luncheon food

With in-laws, threw up being a pater,

Abandoned all for being sweetly 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 the blue 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 sleepy

White-cliffs town.  An English dawn held to form

With sunshine spread across the day.  Sleepy

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, not old.

    Why shouldn’t this first Sunday make them bold?

4

O, Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!

 

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 the Sabbath platitudes

Surrounding them would ruin their pleasure.

They climbed the threatening cliff attitudes

And leaned towards what they sought, deep, 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 twin Lust 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 tres louche 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 appall,

And didn’t care how many he abused.

He pictured 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.
This boy killed alexandrines 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

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 the red wines of French zones.
Paul did not recognize the auguring.
Both didn’t sense it in their guts or bones,
But both were lost so far as love could lose
Them, one fanatical about the dugs
Of poetry, his 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 splendour 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’s.  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.  Arthur 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, a 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.

 

II  Back in Bleu Paris

19

                          Mixing It

“Come, dear great soul, you are awaited, you

Are called,” wrote Paul when swallowing those verses,

The first of Arthur’s offerings.  This debut

Brought on the kisses—and the hearses—

Of this fuming, famous friendship.  Stainless

Steel started becoming reality

In Rimbaud’s century, but nothing painless

Leads through passion to ideality.

“My very real, my very deep, profound,

Persistent friendship with Rimbaud,” is what

Verlaine insisted.  But then he clowned,

“I won’t say very pure.”  There was the smut.

The point is, stainless steel has limits, too,

This smelted alloy, strong and impure brew.

20      Sweetness Red and Blue,     10 on the Richter Scale “A kind of sweetness glimmered and smiled in those cruel, pale-blue eyes and on those powerful red lips with their acrimonious curl.” Graham Robb, Rimbaud, 115-116, quoting Verlaine upon Rimbaud What kind of man remarks upon the lips And eyes of one particular young male?— A man who wants to bite and part the hips Beneath those irises; make the boy flail With passion; yes, a man who wants to lick And love those eyelids, to intensify The cruel, galvanic blue behind them, stick His harsher love inside the boy, see eye Scrunch closed in acrimonious, shocked hiss. This proves a man who hardens his desire, Beyond the boy’s imagining, to kiss Away the curl of lip with scarring fire. The trouble is that it’s this man who shakes When boys are gone, jolts with tectonic aches.

 

21

 

                           Michel Eudes de l’Hay

                         Blond and Blue

He painted cocks.  He calmed down Arthur when

Another fit of rage propelled the boy

To violence because of certain men,

Especially those those who thought that they could toy

With poetry in front of him.  L’Hay took

The angry Rimbaud to his room that night.

The painter’s beauty won.  Arthur forsook

His fury for the artist’s stunning light-

Haired beauty.  Verlaine said it was “among

The most remarkably handsome ever

Seen.”  Who needs writing and brushes when young

Pumped pulchritude offers you a lever?

  When poets find perfection in a hunk

    Of blondness, everything else becomes junk.

 

22

          The Monster Sin of Sins

The monster sin of sins must be to make
A beautiful young man feel sad, a blond
One certainly. To bring blue eyes to ache
Will always be iniquity beyond

Forgiveness, for their spinel         purity

Must be protected by the strongest laws

Of God. A sky-colored security
Is blue eyes’ right. They were Jehovah’s cause
For speaking out the cosmos from His lips:
Blue irises beam the point of His breath.
The rest—those shoulders, genitals, the hips—
Were not His motive for creating death.
Creating Adam’s eyes was worth the strife
Brought on by lesser things, that snake and wife.

23

                   Devotion

“amber and spunk”

The men there knew he wasn’t just a punk
Kid.  For a few it must have been his eyes.
A heart made up of amber and of spunk
Was perfect as the foil to surprise
In two-toned irises of blue.  Their shock
Was offset by that creamy orange gem
Inside his torso.  Men were put in hock
When they exposed themselves to it. For them
Refraction from that jewel of cum combined
With semi-precious, ancient, flame-like stone
(Close juxtaposed with that poetic mind
And ultra-blue twinned circles) could dethrone.
Black pupils with the agate were not mixed,

Were like dark victims in the amber fixed.

24

 

I try to fathom why he has that haze
In azure eyes.  No one can tell.  I’ve asked
His friends about that gaze.
They all go blank.  Not one of them when tasked
To give interpretation of his black
Long curled lashes can offer any hint
As to their mythic strength.  Each heart goes slack
When thinking of his hair, its Delphic glint.
His nose, his cheek, his lips, his shoulders’ own
Occultic powers impossible to know.
His chest, his thighs, his hips, his haired shin bone
Are mystic and replace religion’s glow.
Then when these elements all move as one
They veil the Father, Holy Ghost, and Son.

25

     Before and Après, Gay, Schmay

His organs zinged his gayness, all.  His balls

Inside their rumpled sweating sac of skin

Were permeated with this lust as Paul’s

Face felt them slapping up against his chin

And flopping frenziedly to make him fart

When Rimbaud’s ramming stopped and he withdrew

His young gay cock at last.  The boy’s heart

Was jumped up, frantic, needing to spew

Its gay explosion—and his rumpled brain

Was filled in every pumping fold with gay

Needs.  Straight desire would have left a stain

In Arthur, like a banker’s worsted gray.

Gay chromosomes meant Paul fucked him all one night.

The lad bragged, “Can’t even hold in my shite,”

Afterward.

 

26

                Failed Conversions

“That Rimbaud, that Verlaine’s young lover, that

Abomination of disgust” is how

He was described by Rollinat.  A brat—

“That glorious one”—however you endow

Him with Levitical and jealous terms

Was really just a genius like a gay

Who, through manipulating men’s lust, worms

His way into their beds.  There he holds sway,

Tempting them to try to reverse their roles,

So that they’ll be the prodigies and he

Will fill with inspiration all their holes,

Especially in hearts.  (No, not to be!)

  Instead he sucks their souls and essence, churns

    Them into poetry that bucks and burns.

27

              Two Musky Queers,

         Late May till July 3, 1873:

  One for Love and One for Poetry

Pour l’instant je t’embrasse bien et compte sur une bien prochaine entrevue, don’t tu me donnes l’espoir pour cette semain.   Des que tu me feras signe, j’y serais.

[For now I kiss you well and count on a forthcoming meeting that you are allowing me to believe will be this week. As soon as you are ready, I’ll be there.]

  ~ Letter dated 18 May from Verlaine to Rimbaud when both of them were back in France during a break from their sojourn in London

The kisses, seemingly, were better on

The page and in the heart than in a room

In Camden.  There the nightmare light of dawn

Made even love seem grimy in the gloom

Of hangovers.  Holy that belief that

Paul had had in France, that faith, the cad, lead

Him on to breathe, became a vomit spat,

A herring splatted hard against Paul’s head.

The heart’s blood eagerness for meeting lurched

To melodrama and self pity, two

Things that Paul was genius at.  Arthur smirched

It all with callousness at Paul’s boo hoo.

  They both were ready, sure enough, but both

    Desired a separate and unrhyming troth.

                    III  Black and Blue, Ivre London

28

 

          The Price of Poetry

“It’s Verlaine just arrived from Brussels…. He is handsome in his own way, and, despite being severely short of clothes, gives no sign of being overwhelmed by misfortune.

“We spend some delightful hours together.

“But he is not alone.  He has with him a silent companion who does not exactly sparkle with elegance either.

“It’s Rimbaud.” ~ Félix Régamey in London

A lack of sparkle in their stylishness

Was so pronounced that even friends remarked

On it.  But Rimbaud’s regal vile-ishness

Was not apparent to the painter.  Narked

Off Félix would have been if he had known

How brutal Arthur was in lice-filled beds

With Paul.  A genius doesn’t have to own

A sous of decency while wearing shreds

Of clothing, or while nude, or making love

So-called.  What mattered to this smutty lout

Was ramping up his ego far above

Poor Paul (and maybe making Paul shout out

With pain while lording steeply in his holes).

This Rimbaud needed sleaze for free verse goals.

29

 

Illuminations, 35 Howland Street

No more than just a single, husk-like room,
Their cube in Howland Street became the place
Where greatness found inception, found its womb.
While huddling in this bolthole from disgrace,
Paul wrote adagios, pale, “sans Paroles,”
And in this darkness Arthur Rimbaud’s stark
Experiments escaped his black light soul
In spider webs and left a purple mark
Like slime from ultraviolet poison snails.
Paul dreamed of languor after ecstasy
While Arthur scraped for precious stones with nails,
Scrabbling in Gomorrah’s fire-flood debris.
Paul focused on the aftermaths of lusts
And Arthur on how blood and filth form crusts.

30

 

               A Little Lie to Get His

                 Reader’s Ticket at

               the British Museum

If anything, the young Rimbaud was far
Too forthright, like a sword-blade honesty.
He slashed with truth no matter what the scar
That wound  might cause.  But then to get some free
Ink, pens and heating, and a place to write
In civilized surroundings, Arthur had
To lie about his age.  It was a plight
That teenagers grapple with, growing bad
Enough to be an adult.  Knavery
Of brutal sorts was well within his scope:
It took a trigger-happy bravery
To blast Paul’s marriage, fatherhood and hope
(Not mentioning  his arsehole), crucify
His hand and heart.  Never mind the white lie.

31

                 Offended Arthur

“Paul’s habit of drinking in the mornings offended Arthur,
who preferred to stay sober until after a day
studying at the [British] library.”

Can you believe it?  Arthur (Rimbaud!) felt
Offended by Paul’s morning drinking vice.
This youth was the one who regularly dealt
Out wounds and insults, not to mention lice,
To other guys, no matter who they were.
He’d snarl at a tip top writer, sneer
While showing chambermaids his pubic fur,
And stab his fellow fuckin’ poet peer.
Verlaine should spend his morning writing French
Vers immortel, as Rimbaud did, of course,
Gassing Marx’s Kapital with his stench
Of B.O. and his insolence’s force.
In public he yelled, “I can’t hold my shite
In, coz he’s been buttscrewing me all night!”

32

As on the Smoked Walls of Lascaux

“To judge simply by their writings, Verlaine

and Rimbaud had not an active political idea

to juggle between them—‘I don’t read the

French papers any more,’ Verlaine wrote to

a friend in June 1873. ‘But what harm in that?’

If they were anarchists, it was the anarchism

of insobriety, bad company, irregular meals.

But it might be argued that Rimbaud was the

first great poet to inscribe his writing with

the notion that the personal is political.” ~  James Campbell

Did Rimbaud and Verlaine meet Karl Marx?

Who cares?  Great poetry ain’t Communist

Or any other -ist.  Its force and sparks

Are made from fog and psychoactive mist.

Imagine if you can, Picketty as

An epic poet, or a posy of

Iambics by Stalin.  Poets’ pizzazz

Comes not from Naziism’s push and shove

But from the forelock of a Gaza boy

In candlelight.  Surrealism is

Not doctrines.  We derive its twisted joy

From heads sawed off by Coca-Cola fizz,

From brains stabbed through with unexpected dreams

And passions carved inside a heart’s extremes.

33

                    Getting Away with It

Socrates said, “Alcibiades is unhappy because everywhere Alcibiades goes, Alcibiades takes himself with him.”

If you were in a rented room with Paul
On Howland Street, you too would want to spend
Your time away from him, away from all
That drunkenness and moaning.  You would wend
Your way as often as you could to read
Away your hours and to write away
His gripes.  What see-through useless good to speed
Away from France and women if each day
Was filled with relocated whining stench?
They’d come to get away and leave behind
The troubles that had come from being French
Among the French, but  Paul was still confined
To being Paul, while Rimbaud found escape,
Subjecting life to his transforming rape.

34

 

                   Heartless Books

He spiralled through erotic books complete With spelling errors, and Church Latin ones, Complete with telling errors, sneered at sweet Tales “read by grandmothers” but not their sons. He even leafed through little children’s books But not because of Paul’s deserted boy. Rimbaud refused to give the slightest looks To sheets that gave the bourgeoisie their joy. “I owe my own superiority To having no heart.”  The boy should have told Poor Paul that fact.  Inferiority Has been his fate because those ribs were cold. If there had been two hearts that felt the flare, Their verses could have made a helix prayer.

35

  Rimbaud Doctoring the

        Satan in Verlaine

“Satan in the midst of the doctors” ~ Leon Valade (about Rimbaud)

It’s obvious Verlaine was crazy, mad
With green self-pity, at least neurotic,
A hypochondriac who’d hug a bad
Cold as pneumonia, a psychotic
Delusionist about the sniffles.  Of
Course he was also over the top
About abandoning his son for love
Of Rimbaud; add some alcohol, a drop
Of wormwood—instant insanity.  Doc
Rimbaud, all guns blazin’, was supposed to
Become the Great Physician and to shock
The man to health with drops of amour bleu.
Instead Rimbaud traipsed off to write and scan
Near Marx, the world’s quack medicine man.

36

       Forbidden Fruit/Fruit interdit

Imagine then a little boy who finds
A house set back alone in orange trees
That has its windows barred but has no blinds.
Inside a wonder world of toys he sees,
The sorts of toys which everyone like him
Would want.  He tiptoes high to look inside
And scans a room absolutely abrim
With painted soldiers and a horse to ride,
With marbles, balls and one bright cowboy gun.
So Rimbaud felt when he was calmly told
That the one author, yes, the very one
He wanted most was prudishly controlled
So he could never hold it.  “There’s no God,”
He muttered.  He was forbidden de Sade.

37

Rimbaud Suppressed this Sonnet

        Here it is Englished by Phillip Whidden

How tight is Jesus Christ’s arse sphincter?  Is

It tighter than the back hole of a dove?

(So sorry, Holy Ghost!)  Or did the jizz

Of saintly John, the one who taught Him love,

Slick up and loosen that elastic ring?

No!  Wait!  Most probably Lucifer stretched

The Son’s ass first and made that virgin sing.

The Father found where Satan’s sex had etched

Its aria inside the boy and threw

The angel^† out.  Buddha knew Nirvana

Could be attained only by a great screw

With something shaped like a bent banana.

  Who’s tightest assed in any Valhalla?

    It has to be that Muslim bloke, Allah.

^† “Angel” was a euphemism for a gay man in nineteenth-century France.

 

38

                         You Know

You know those blunted scissors used in schools?
Well, masturbation is like wielding them,
Because you know that it’s with other tools
That sex will crown you with its diadem
Of brilliants, pearls, and softer metal, hard
And soft at once.  Those scissors are just fine,
You know, for cutting a clumsy-esh card
But not for dealing with neat, Byzantine,
Slick intricacies of higher fashion
And certainly not for convergencies
Involved in later stages of passion,
Those cramp-like, deepest stabbing urgencies,
Bass, piercing sex, two cataracts that flow
Together, cutting through two lives . . . you know.

39

 

His scissoring opens legs to give entry
To man’s other hole, that entry bottoms want.
I master with my lust the weak sentry
Of masculinity to let the blunt
Assault access his undefended cores
Inside him, cores of willing guts and heart.
He wants relief as strong as stabbing whores,
But he’s the one to take the brutal part
Up starkly in his depths, to make descent
In power until all things—gush-gasp-breath-wish—
Are unified in passionate assent,
Become a joint life-affirming death wish.
His legs and pain are scissors, opened wide,
To let me slice to cutting his inside.

40

 

 Together in the Victoria and Albert Museum

 

We pause among the works of golden coil,
The spyglass and the little boxes for
Perfumes and snuff and golden frames for oil
Mementos in miniature.  The more
Reduced in size, increased in detail, they
Appear to grow from plain to more ugly.
It seems to me that if you’re going to pay
To have a man paint your girl so snugly,
In total complexity, that he would
Assume, especially because the price
Was rather huge, the woman’s portrait should
Show prettiness of face and limb . . . be nice.
  Mais non.  His gaff was a philistine sin.
….He thought you just wanted everything in.

41

 

          Rimbaud Writes about Religion

                  in the British Museum

Weird sex destroys everything.  That’s why
The preachers hate it. Wildest sex, the weird
Beyond the weird, bombastic, slick, and sly
Should be condemned through every mullah’s beard,
Anathematized from cathedra, throne
And pulpit, most especially by priests
And popes and bishops who’ve just left their own
Excited, sacred semen inside beasts,
Or bent-over boys, or on the faces
Of women just pissed on, or underarms
That they’ve been humping—in all the places
That hold forbidden, slimy, hairy charms.
..And when the holy ones have spent their spill,
….We wilder partners will have had our fill.

42

The Trinity Has Existed in Azure Passion for Eternity

“An individual’s poetic quality is a function of his gift of love”

          ~ Robert Goffin

 

“Sa seule beauté était dans ses yeux d’un bleu pale irradié de

          bleu foncé, les plus beaux yeus” ~ Ernest Delahaye

If poetry arises as a gift

Of heart, sends thrums as pumping functions of

The maker’s arteries and veins—the lift

Of yelling liquid oxygen called love—

Then poets act as rockets to the spheres

That pre-existed constellations’ moons

For God was breathing long before jazz tears

And long before whatever fragrant runes

He spoke against the nothingness around

Divinity.  His villanelle was like

The eyes of Rimbaud, like aromas drowned

In lightest blue, pierced by the spike, spike, spike

Of night’s soul stabs of starkest navy light,

Perfection made more faultless by that blight.

43

 

          Songs without Turds?

The difficulty is that poets who
Write great poetry, remain kids at heart.
They can’t abandon kiddie laughs.  In lieu
Of subtle humor, they prefer a fart.
Paul let his absinth, drugs, and other shit
Like booze get in the way of poetry
And love.  He turned himself into a twit
With chemical perversions so that he
Could not compose much more in noble words
Than moaning letters, pettish diary notes,
And jokes with Rimbaud based on sexy turds.
On troubled waters manly passion floats.
..It seems that Verlaine wasn’t hard to please.
….He didn’t mind a little merde et cheese.

 

44

                              Ever Open

Except for Wallace Stevens, poets are
Strange.  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Verlaine”
Could be a poem’s name about how far
Gone these bizarre rhymesters tend to be.  When
Quill-driving with Rimbaud in London, Paul
Wrote to him claiming to be “your old cunt”
And “ever open or opened,” this all
Composed in French except the old, bold cunt
Used bestest English when it came to choice
Words, like “open,” “ever open” and “old
Cunt.”  Poets seem to adopt a blunt voice
When they’re besotted by a rude and gold-
Voiced boy.  However, an ordinary
Guy gruntingly yields his arsehole cherry.

45

They didn’t know much English.  Still they set
Off.  Probably they didn’t know the Wife
Of Bath’s desire for sovereignty. Her pet
Thought, Amor vincit omnia, is rife
In poets’ hearts, though, and no matter which
One had the mastery of language or
Controlled the other man, they had the twitch
To keep them going strong in bed.  Adore
The boy, Paul did, but also loved the girl
He’d left behind.  Young Arthur was ablaze
To change the universe; Paul in a swirl
Of indecision, lost in Cupid’s maze.
..Their lack of English was a stumbling block,
….But then . . . they had each other’s rumbling cock.

46

         A Vacation from London

Nobility is not what these two sought,
But when they set out on a holiday,
Verlaine tied up his little book’s last knot,
Did rhyming on their Dover/Ostend way,
Romances sans paroles, there on the ship,
“Comtesse de Flandres.”  No degree of rank
Or status held the sway of Rimbaud’s hip
In Paul’s experience.  However swank
The titles or degrees, they would have been
As nothing to the thrills his heart had felt
The times they’d fucked in London’s filthy scene.
Verlaine was king while licking Rimbaud’s pelt.
..Paul soon was desperate to be in bed
    There, shooting cum into that rhymeless head.

47

What must it be to be a Mrs. Smith

(A Mrs. Alexander Smith to be precise),

To live beneath a stillborn pregnant myth,

To rent a room to gods unwittingly,

Immortal beasts of poetry, to hear

The centaur grunts and noises from their bed,

Two godless gods inhabiting the sphere

Above her own bored bed as those two shed

Their sweat and semen?  Did she know the black

Soot walls of Ague Town nearby were next

To lyric legends, aphrodisiac

To these two guys in rhyme and oversexed?

  To be a normal woman would imply

    She didn’t know how guts were set awry.

48

          Rimbaud Describes Fucking

                Verlaine’s Ideal Cave

His arse feels like it’s lined with furry moss

And fuzzy lichen at its entrance, but

The cave itself’s slick, like it’s filled with sauce

Made up of gloss and fornication cut

With poetry and shed paternity.

There’s also adultery’s slime in there.

My cock slides into his eternity,

Smooth like his balding head with fringe of hair.

I pound the urgent alexandrines crammed

In darkness deep there, longing to be born.

My long young pen dips into them, is rammed

Among their ink until his guts are torn

With pleasures, his and mine, until my quill

Makes verses dribble out in scribbled free verse spill.

49

          8 Royal College Street Couplet

A modest building on a modest street,

Just up the road from Old St. Pancras Church—

A decent neighborhood . . . and in a seat

Inside the windows Paul’s prick gives a lurch

As Rimbaud’s belt assaults his trembling thigh.

A welt appears beneath the body hair

That’s just been crushed, thrillingly.  The boy’s eye

Takes in the bruise, the hair beneath the flare

Of red corona twitchingly escaped

From foreskin by the tightness of desire

And degradation, tip no longer caped

In fleshly skin and veins pulsing with fire.

  Then Rimbaud throws Paul down, fucks up his bowel.

    New realms of verse shoot past his cockhead cowl.

50

               Verlaine’s Response

How many men have ever had the chance

To fuck a teenage genius in the ass?

(Could this occur  alone in foreign France?

Well, no!  They fucked in London, had the brass

To bed in Camden . . . bucked in Brussels, too.)

It’s clear that Rimbaud wanted deep fucking

By balding Paul and at least one or two

Among some others offered steep fucking

Of Arthur’s most poetic part.  But once

Or twice at least he thought he’d had enough

And cried out, “Why can’t you guys be the cunts?

Why don’t you let me fill you with my stuff !?”

“Come on, my poet boy. I want your knob.

      Climb on my Parnassian ass–and THROB!”

51

 

Is suffering not suffering if bathetic?

If one of them, though adult, asks his mum

To rescue him, is that so pathetic

That it’s not agony?  He goes to slum

Around a foreign city with his mate

(In every sense) but gets so drunk and fucked

By love and booze they might as well be hate.

He loses all control and blubs, self-schmucked,

In pain so total, like the London fog

Mixed through with absinthe poison, that he sobs

Out, “Mummy, come and save me from the frog

Who didn’t turn into my prince!”  She robs

His battered manhood with her salvation.

She lessens pain, providing castration.

52

                        Kissing Hands

 

   ‘Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances’ ~ Walt Whitman

Did they shake hands or something so banal?
Did they hold hands or anything that sweet
When walking side by side on the canal
In Camden?  Did Rimbaud’s fingers compete
With Paul’s in little tickling, touching, tame
Childlike play après they comprehended
What their affair was all about, that game
Of violent love and passion that ended
With gunshot wounding of the poet’s wrist?
Was this some tit for tat repayment for
The adolescent prankishness that kissed
Paul’s hand so deeply with the blade-deep gore?
..They didn’t aim for justice, not those two.
….They wanted all things knife-deep, cock-deep, true.

53

               An Immodest Georgian Mansion

 

 

                            Montpellier House, 165 King’s Road, Reading

 

Do people ever think of Rimbaud as

A Georgian or Victorian?  Well, no,

But turning poetry to razzmatazz

Occurred substantially in London, though

In Reading, Berkshire, too, so why not call

His jumped up, jazzy psychotropic verse

Victorian or Georgian with its squall

Coming from crippled saxophones?  His terse

Rejection of the old was written out

In Georgian buildings and Victorian

Years.  He created with his inky clout

More destruction than Oscar’s Dorian

And caused an architecture (in wild lines

That followed) of freakish, feral designs.

54

                  Montpellier House,

           165 King’s Road, Reading—

            Cassandra Perceiving the

           Death of her Own Prophecy

Undoubtedly Le Clair’s assistant stayed

Just underneath the rafters of the house.

Up there in poem’s attic the crusade

To revolutionize the world and douse

Old-fashioned poetry with scribbled scorn

Was petering out.  He made his lists of words

In English for the poems still unborn

Inside his shrivelling womb, though dried up turds

Are what he’d started to suspect were more

The upshot of his prophecy to change

The universe.  The writer’s Trojan War

Was tranced, the stallion’s buckin’ to derange

His senses and the sense of poetry.

This seer now foresaw failed destiny.

55

 

“Le piano que baise une main frêle”

   [The piano is touched by a frail hand]

   or

   [The piano which a frail hand kisses]

The corners of the room are haunted by
The musk of sweat from adolescent hair
In armpits.  It pervades too much like sly
Perfume that hints at trauma in the air.
I smell a sudden feeling here of past
Attacks now turned to gray, and blood of red
Intense enough to pain, now turned aghast
To putrid rosy pink.  It leaves the bed
Where he is sleeping, arms thrown back where they
Collapsed when I had fucked him stupid.  Now
Contemplative and feeling bland as whey,
I wonder why young earth allows this plough.
If I should touch his keys again and wake
His instrument, we’d play the old mistake.

56

     “Ô triste, triste était mon amê”

http://hollytannen.com/play/TorturedHeart.htm

My soul was sad and sad.  It’s only friend
Was sadder still, my heart.  Their colloquy
Was far too sentimental in its trend,
Despite formality imposed as key
To saving both from maudlin drift.  The soul
Attempted bravery, the courage that
A boy might summon while his nether hole
Is being raped by soldiers on a mat

In communard exuberance.  My heart
Refused this masculine dissembling.  No,
My chest was filled to bursting with the smart
Of leering thrusts.  I felt each, blow by blow.
..The best of all was guilt at filling him
..  With hard love lunging in his loosened quim.

57

Rimbaud wrote a crude Koran with his dreams;
Well, more like nightmares that become commands.
Where others saw that life and poems had seams,
He knew that they were red-hot chainmail bands
And lived and wrote them both and cast them off
While living and composing.  Others bowed
To rules by reacting.  He filled their trough
And jeered while all the rest were drowned or cowed.
Rimbaud devoured the anvil and spat it
Out sharp, an Apollo 11 made
Of synaesthesia crossed with cum and shit.
The boy’s destruction forged the future’s blade.
..Rimbaud ordered all the past to be fried.
….The poet raped the groom, buggered the bride.

58

 

             Kissed, Missed, Wrist

They tested mettle with metal.  Never

Mind stabbing with a knife there with their group

As audience.  Nothing is forever,

Especially with boyish pranks.  Don’t stoop

To condescension’s snigger.  They both tried

To make the grand experiment of art

Combined with love—and all that this implied—

Pound out the carat perfect goldsmith’s dart.

Of course they should have realized that men

Are more like iron than gold, not pliable

Enough like it.  We think it should have been

Obvious that bullets are liable

To harm.  Well after the passions and rage

He called Paul’s bars “the little widow’s cage.”

59

If Only Someone Had Sent Verlaine

     Arthur’s High School Report

The perfect monster that he grew to be

Attained its zenith lacking moons and stars

In London.  He went on a hateful spree,

Campaigning there to gouge his man with scars

External and internal, both in time

And in eternity—assuming there

Is such a thing for victim poets.  Crime

Was Rimbaud’s goal in Camden where the stair

Surged up towards wounds and insults to the heart.

He hated lyricism of a sort

That moved in softness, sadness—sweeter art.

He favored blood and semen by the quart.

  One high school teacher augured this of him

    That he was galaxies malformed and grim.

 

 

 

60

               La Danse Interminable

Et vous, les loups maigres ~ Romances sans paroles, Verlaine

The moon is closed inside a copper shell,
A casing of your manufacture, lad.
Although my destiny’s a minor hell
Compared to others’ sufferings, it’s sad
Enough for me.  The landscape of our love
Is like a plain of burning sand and stain,
Yet beautiful beneath that moon above
And in a sense beyond its meaning.  Pain

Is waxing now, but when it wanes, the sphere
Inside the metal shape may really rise,
A moonrise that will more than just appear
To bribe theophany from sapphire eyes.
I have become a crow of broken wind
Now writing desert lines wolves can’t rescind.

61

  In Despondent Mood

“in despondent mood” ~ Verlaine, “Birds in the Night,” Romances Sans Paroles The Anglo-Saxons said that life was bleak As one bird flying in a stormy night Which enters through a window like a streak And out the other window of the bright Hall filled with men carousing with their mead. The bird goes in a flash through merriment And then is seen no more.  This was their creed. Verlaine was meant to be a malcontent. Depression was his milieu.  He would do Anything to feed his melancholy, Drink absinthe till his valentine was blue. Verlaine was Holy Sadness’ devotee. ..God’s malice supplied a ferry ticket ….And Rimbaud rammed up Paul’s wretched thicket.

 62

                         RIMBAUD

I do not think the boy will really leave me,
But if he does, I’ll sleepwalk through the rest
Of time with Holy God’s dark rosary
In hand and fumble beads to make the best
Of  days  and  nights  and  years  and  decades  lost
To numbness in the chambers of the heart,
The  seconds,  minutes,  hours  that he’ll have tossed
Away, abandoning my love.  I’ll dart
From Christtoboozetootherboystotarts,
To Poetry of Wisdom for the Church,
A peasant student working on farm carts.
If all else fails, I’ll have my absinthe perch.
..I’ll lose my hair.    I’ll hold on to my faith.
….I’ll die, if death’s permitted for a wraith.

 

63

                Distant Intervals

“It is the distant dramas of friends that are hardest to conjure up.”
~ Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts, 239

“And it’s only at distant intervals that I see the friend to whom I’ve given all my affection”
~ Verlaine

My whole long youth I “lived” without him. When
He came along my “life” had been entrapped
In marriage. He became my Saracen
Whose scimitar-like maleness thunder-clapped
My wedding and my son and wife away.
My friends reviled him, all except his verse.
His compositions tended to dismay
Them all, making theirs seem paltry—or worse.
And then life separated him from me.
I went to jail and God and other bars.
He evanesced into infinity,
As distant as chords made from icy Mars.
..My life began and ended in a loss.
….His melodies were asteroids in dross.

64

           Ricochet Revenge

                      

 

Imagine Rimbaud comes from Aden, goes

To Paris just when Georges, the son of Paul,

Is sixteen and they meet.  The lost son glows

With fur and furtive hate.  They do a crawl

Around the bars and cafés Arthur knew

Before and finds that Verlaine fils is dull

Except the striking likeness to that screw

Buddy all those nights ago.  Georges is full

Of mediocrity and cum, canny

Enough to take this chance to get his own

Back.  Spite makes plans to give him his fanny

So he can kill, but his thing turns to bone

While father’s lover forces flesh inside

The boy.  His hatred sweats out through his hide.

 

65

                    The Omnibus

We ride past, jostling in our seats, and can’t

Make out the wording on the plaque; so close,

And yet importance can be missed.  We pant

To make connection and to get a dose

Of greatness or at least of meaning.  Paul

Reached out for these.  The reach exceeded grasp.

His greenish drug turned poetry to drawl.

He tried a fleshy drug but couldn’t clasp

The boy enduringly.  He tried a wife

And child.  He tried to hold some other boys.

He tried the Christ and crucifix, the life

Of rosaries and little prayerish noise.

  Rimbaud tried newness, Paul repetition,

    Including a fog of superstition.

66

14 Poetic Months in London and 18 in England

 

“In morality and talent this Raimbard [sic], aged between 15 and 16 [at the time Paul and Arthur met], was and is a monster.  He can construct poems like no one else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive.  Verlaine fell in love with Raimbard, who shared his ardour….

‘”We love each other like tigers!’ And, so saying, he bared his chest in front of his wife. It was bruised and tattooed with knife wounds administered by his friend Raimbard.  These two creatures were in the habit of fighting and lacerating each other so they could have the pleasure of making up again afterwards.”

    ~ A Parisian police constable named Lombard, writing before the poets went to London, as quoted in Graham Robb’s Rimbaud, 177-178.

When Paris comes in second place in art,

We need to notice.  At least the French do.

And, so, when Arthur Rimbaud, for his part,

Spent far more time in London than the few

Months he infested Paris with his pride

And lice, then someone should take notice.  Add

To this the time he lived in England wide

Of London, and, yeah, Britons should be glad

To hail him as their poet, yeah, their own.

He wrote or polished up his verses in

The British Museum with their unknown

Meanings and then kept on scribbling his sin

In King’s Road, Reading, Berkshire, too, and so

The Brits can arrogate him as their beau.

67

                 Un Ange Ivre

He came as angel and as thug, as gay,
And mad as drug-infested members in
A cholo gang.  He didn’t have to play
The part of wild provincial boy akin
To Mozart crossed with Noble Savages:
That’s what he was.  He was a cannibal,
Incestuous in his verse ravages.
He was to poetry as Hannibal
To Rome as it sat swilling tongues of larks.
In England Rimbaud turned from villanelles,
Revealed himself like loonies in the parks
Of London raving acid, crazy spells.
In France he wrote about a drunken boat.
In Britain he set modern verse afloat.

 

68

                   Speaking of Lice:

                And Only Man is Vile

“unbelievably brutal, loud-mouthed people in the streets”

~ Paul Verlaine on the people of London

“To see oursels as ithers see us” ~ Robert Burns

He said that they were small and skinny, too,

Emaciated, most especially

The poor; an accidental forecast, true

Of Paul’s and Arthur’s lifetimes, unfleshily

Accomplished like a prophet who sees things

Around him and his partner and predicts

Unknowingly that they will know the slings

And arrows of the same.  Today evicts

The happiness of futures.  What we see

In others now will overwhelm us then.

Tomorrow is today’s slung prophecy.

The suffering of others slammed these men

In London—and then later.  This foul punk

And lover shrivelled.  Every prospect shrunk.

69

                       James 3:5-8

This ruthless writer in the history
Of modern poésie française was slapped
Because he mocked his only devotee.
Fauve Rimbaud mocked Verlaine and Verlaine snapped.
He smacked the boy across the face with lunch.
The fish he’d bought for them to eat became
The weapon for his temper’s pettish punch.
Compared to knives and gunshots this was tame,
Contemptuous enough, though.  It destroyed
The only infamous affair between
Two male French poets.  These heroes, who toyed
With every rule and treated as obscene
The common decencies, wrecked their pairing
With anarchic words and salted herring.

 

70

 

            On a Ship and Pier

“If you only knew how fucking silly you look with that herring in your hand!”

~ Arthur to Paul

The catalyst was just a single fish.
No.  There was oil, too, both held up to . . .
To what?  To show the other what main dish
Was in the offing, or to mock the goût
That they’d created as a couple there
In Camden, Belgium and in France, the whole
Terrain of zeal around them, their affair,
Its climates and its soils.  This sad Creole
Concoction, their bizarre relationship,
Collapsed in heat because one held some food
Up in a London street.  The heroes’ trip
To rhyming hearts suddenly came unglued.
..By noon Verlaine was on a ship away
….From love, with Arthur waving in dismay.

71

How Something Solid as this Man

“The shadow of the trees in the misty river dies like smoke” ~ Verlaine, Romances sans Paroles How something solid as this man beside Me there dissolved to nothing more than smoke To less than little wave-foam on the tide Mixed in with shadows of a willow, oak,And hulking bridge I’ll never understand. We travelled there together and we lay In stricken silence, poetry unmanned, In dirty upper rooms.  I was his prey Or he was mine.  We lay down like a lamb And lion in their paradise, except We both gnawed muscles of the heart in sham Affection, as filthy secrets kept. ..A foggy, night-time river won’t allow ….Much light to help false lovers shirk their vow.

72

        Emancipation Proclamation

“You’re free alone with me,” the boy wrote

To Paul when he had made his cowardly

Decision and had fled by pettish boat.

“I, only, offer you your liberty.”

This freedom was la liberté of slaves,

Though.  La égalité was not discussed,

Nor brotherhood.  Infatuation waives

Away equivalence with blindest, brusk

Dismissal.  La fraternité was not

On offer by the younger man.  “You stick

With me or live in misery of snot

And tears with others.  Do not be so thick!”

..But indecision, Paul’s default non-choice,

….Made Verlaine deaf to Rimbaud’s siren voice.

73

               July the Fourth, 1873

Rimbaud recalls his older man to crawl
To Arthur’s bed in Camden and return
To more abuse and weak man’s pain, but Paul
Refuses.  He has had enough to burn
His heart forever and to brand it with
Hard scars to last for an eternity
And so he chooses, in the end, the myth
That Christ and Pope (two men) can make Paul free.
He mumbles up some words and fumbles up
A candle flame for all that now is gone.
A tasteless wafer and a shuffling cup
Are what he thinks will bring a fragrant dawn.
..But Paul remains just Paul.  The chalice spills
….Salvation.   Paul recalls young Arthur’s thrills.

74

His Eyes, His Hair, the Seasons in London

The overarching springtime blue in May
Was set with bluebell darker tints in flecks.
Those irises were perfect in the way
A nearly purple paragon respects
The imperfection of the rest.  His hair
Was summertime in arching blast
From that head, up, except in portions where
It sloped in darkly like an autumn past.
All these were sacred shrines.  All were taboo.
To touch them, kiss them, lave each one with tongue
Was sacrilege and always, ever new,
A worship, traumatizing hearts, as stung
By angels sent to Lot.  The only white
Lodged in his eyes.  They held a winter blight.

75

     A Sentimental Convergence

Rambunctiousness invaded Paris for

A while when Rimbaud arrived, an army

Of one belligerent.  Soul of a whore

And manners of a rapist of the smarmy

Bourgeoisie made him a Communard of

Less than a year’s time there.  Arthur ran

Away to Belgium with his bizarre love.

Then both made their way to London.  His man

Was violent, a druggie, and a drunk,

Thus perfect.  Bald Verlaine was besotted

With Rimbaud.  This made Paul into a hunk

For Arthur.  They were true romance clotted

In England, like curds with absinthe and blood

In Camden.  They proved passion can be crud.

76

Nostalgia Ain’t Wot it Used to Be

The adolescent brilliance finds itself

Entrapped once more in Charleville.  He finds

His genius brusquely returned to the shelf

Of mère and provincialisme.  This blinds

Him blackly so he cannot see his way

Except to kiddie , smutty graffiti

Of crudest slashing.  He daubs a display,

“Shit on God.”  It isn’t an entreaty

The poet makes or a demand.  Despair

Is ghost-writing with Rimbaud’s teenaged fist,

Reduced to scrawling in the city square

On park benches castratedly while pissed.

..This blot is briefly scored out from his head

….In splatting moments in a Camden bed.

77

A Dining Room with Keyboard Music

The fourteen months or so that Rimbaud spent

In London aren’t enough to make the claim

That he was England’s modern man who went

To places other poets couldn’t name.

Verlaine was pushing boundaries, too, in lines,

But his modernity is overlooked

By those who focus only on drugged wines

That Arthur spilled on the table they’d booked

In poetry’s white-linen restaurant.

Verlaine’s productions were as beautiful

And delicate as Rimbaud’s were a taunt

At everything crystal and dutiful.

..Paul crafted lyrics pianissimo.

…The punk banged out, “FUCK YOU!” fortissimo.

78

 

What We Learn in the Great College Street of Knowledge

The worst conclusion to a crimson bout

Of love is truth.  We sniff the smell of facts

And they are ugly mumbles. With his snout

The poet gets the scent.  His heart reacts

Like pack hounds to the trail an orange fox

Lays down and frenzy is the only choice.

Romantic love turns out to be a pox

That leaves its scars on man’s poetic voice.

A slap directed at the face and heart

Is what we suffer when we live to see

Realities.  We try to slice apart

With knives our love from actuality,

But poverty in imaginations

Reduces passions to paltry rations.

79

What London Failed to Teach

Since Rimbaud died, I see him every night,
Again, again in dreams.  He weighs upon
Me.  They have weight, like him.  Nightmares rewrite
Us.  Deep inside my sleep I feel his spawn
Espousing everything I wrote and knew.
I feel it pumping, surging in my guts.
I feel that drug that slimed my heart askew.
It isn’t scars it suffers, but new cuts.
It doesn’t bleed so much as it seeks out
That balm to turn it into healing force.
The night-inflicted wounds dilate and pout
To seek this tincture of spurting remorse.
..Too late I learn that I was meant to slake
….My soul with him as with a vampire’s stake.

 

80

               Marked = Scarred

“I shall gash myself all over.  I shall tattoo myself.

I want to become as hideous as a Mongol.  You’ll see.

I’ll go screaming through the streets.”

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Admit it.  Geniuses are scarred, as are

Perverted men.  If we combine the two

Conditions, what we get is weirdly far

From normal like an Islamist’s world view

Inside the Vatican, a painted black

Graffito up on Michaelangelo’s

Sistine ceiling, as ugly as a slack

Tar crescent, star and an imbecile’s prose.

Such men as these have tattoos in their souls.

Their inner shapes are tangled DNA

Installed by God.  Each malformed heart controls

Their howling while they stalk our streets for prey.

..We need them.  Empires they extend express

….Our unknown dream, crotched Lucifer’s caress.

 

Afterword—

 

81

 

Keats, Rimbaud, Verlaine

Day after day I sit and write French verse
Forms, villanelles and terzanelles.  At noon
I leave the British Library.  “Much worse
Existences,” I say, smugly, “are strewn
Across the urban universe.”  Today
I noticed from the bus Paul Verlaine’s place
He shared with Arthur on my route.  I sway
Off at the stop for Keats’ house. There I pace
The springtime garden, thinking of:  doomed hope
Of man with woman, man with boy, a shot
Fired hotly in a hotel room, a slope
Towards death, of lungs destroyed, of graveyard plot
In Rome, poor Paul!, poor tiny, bleeding Keats!,
Of Rimbaud’s rotten leg, his blank heartbeats.

82

 

Our National Poet Living in London and then at 165 King’s Road, Reading?

More nights in London than in Paris—and

Rimbaud lived in Berkshire, too; in Reading

He wrote prose poems and free verse, not bland,

Tight alexandrine stuff.  He was heading

To modern verse—close to poetry’s death,

Abandoning his mayhem of the art,

A corpse he felt had been strangled of breath

By rhyme and scansion.  They were just stale fart.

That’s what he smelled.  But “Being Beauteous”

Is nonsense, not surreal, adolescent

Drivel, treacle spilled on duteous

Ones, a cliché of the incandescent.

..Since it’s such a totally failed attempt,

….The English might accept him with contempt.

83

                               Each Autre

[Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde were born four days apart from each other.  They both died and are buried in France. Wilde arrived as a student at Oxford at the same time that Rimbaud was abandoning poetry and teaching French in the large house of his employer in Reading, Berkshire, England.  Many years later, long after Rimbaud’s death, Wilde was sent to prison in Reading and put in a solitary cell and sentenced to hard labor for two years.  It is a short stroll from that jail to Montpellier House where Rimbaud had worked and lived.]

Four days apart their births and just a few

Miles separating them, these two young men,

Though geniuses, were destined not to screw

Each other.  One was setting down his pen

Forever, giving up on poetry

In England as the other took his rooms

At Oxford.  They would never even see

The other’s face.  They met their final dooms,

Though, both in France.  In Reading Gaol, a stroll

Away from Rimbaud’s room in Reading, one

Declared his genius in the title role

Of victim, solitary as a nun.

The glitter plays of Oscar on the stage

Were doppelgangers of the other’s rage.

84

 

Charleville and Père Lachaise

While Rimbaud lived in Reading, Oscar Wilde

Arrived in Oxford.  One was finishing

His verse vocation.  The other, mild

As lilies, knew nothing of diminishing

Career and more importantly they both

Were ignorant of future filthy fates.

What separated Arthur from the growth

Of cancer?  Boring time.  These two’s birthdates

Were four days apart.  The one couldn’t fail

At anything, it seemed.  The other went

From where he lived so close to Reading Gaol

To triumph only in a long descent.

The grave in Charleville hides scandalized

Facts.  The other one’s been vandalized.

85

                               Exile

  According to Graham Robb’s biography of Rimbaud, he & Verlaine visited Hyde Park Corner as tourists
during their first period in London.

Did Rimbaud go to visit Number One,
London?  Did Arthur view the Duke’s white bust
Of Cicero and see Napoleon
Butt naked and imperial, but just
Some marble in the victor’s vestibule
Now, vanquished after Waterloo?  The lad
Had worshiped Communards and hoped to fuel
A revolution in French verse that had
Bowed itself to royal alexandrines far too
Long.  But despair destroyed the boy.  He gave
Up, frittered away his chance to make new
The cosmos of poetry.  Not as brave
As Cicero, the gypsy’s weak answer
Was to flop about and die of cancer.

86

Revenez, Revenez, Chers Amis

Come back to us, Verlaine, Rimbaud!  We need
You at this hour.  We need you so that you
Can edify us, show us not to breed
False freedoms.  None of us wants Xanadu
Heaved up by license, anger or your faux
Amour.  We do not want your paradise
That’s built like Pandemonium aglow
With desperation in damned demons’ eyes.
We may be angels, anges, or not.  We may
Be devils.  This we know:  we’re women, men,
And nothing more so far as we can say.
Oh! come, you two poor fiends and friends, again.
..Revenez, mes chers amis.  Your stain
….Is not enough to save us from our pain.

 

87

          The Products of Love’s Smog

The older poet dreamed perhaps of past

Emotions with the younger one (of France

And beds), dreamed, dreamed in daylight and the last

Night hour as wakefulness began to prance

Across subconsciousness of London’s dawn.

The elder man created reveries

In English afternoons of what was gone

Now into yesterdays he could not seize

And in the night-time postures with his arms

Across the boy’s smells.  His dreaming took

On sadnesses of joy skimming harm’s

Dark surface till his frozen entrails shook.

..His writing took on coolness like a light

….Fog cutting imprecision from the night.

 

 

 

 

88

Romantic (Read:  Frantic) Rimbaudians, Drowning in Rimbaud’s Blue, Blue Eyes

Long after Rimbaud died, his thrall falls down

On men and boys, especially those ones

With mental health concerns, yep, those who drown

In . . . sensitivity and . . . music’s sons

No matter if that music is of notes

Or poetry.  Upset so much that they

Are desperate to embark in absinthe boats

In drugged up hunting zones, these guys the prey

Of wildly stupefied testosterone

And slick depression.  Throw some feral words

Around and they will start to twitch and moan

Like shaking penises compacting turds.

  These guys will cast about until they find

    Exotic reasons to abandon mind.

89

              Marriage Proposal

Proposal:  To exhume the bodies of

Two poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine,

And re-entomb them with the one above

The other in a common grave—the men

Together once again and once again,

Forever, one on top.  The digging will

Be done in London where they left their stain

Of thorns and passion and of love’s sliced thrill.

The purpose of this burial will not

Be so that two-edged lust and hearts can turn

To immortality.  If that were sought

The maggots in the grave would start to burn.

..The purpose of this grave can only be

….Perpetuation of Paul’s agony.

 

And Finally and Summatively

90

     The Eyes Have It

“The man was tall, well-built, almost athletically with the perfect oval face of an angel in exile, with untidy light brown hair and eyes of disturbing pale blue” — Paul Verlaine

His irises were doubly blue, dark blue

And azure circled.  Or perhaps they were,

More properly, improper blue shot through

With darker thorns, equivalent to myrrh

And frankincense—if only colors had

A scent, if only Christ deserved to be

Compared to him.  Christ simply wasn’t bad

Enough to parallel this prodigy

Whose eyes and evils and bravura shone

More beautiful than any Christ Child could.

This boy’s sky eyes made more than one man moan

As if their hearts and cocks were nailed to wood.

This Rimbaud’s face contained two rainbows of

Contrasting blue, the specters of verse love.

The End

by phillipw | Jan 14, 2022 | AR, PA, RI, VE | 0 comments