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.
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.
|
21
Michel Eudes de l’Hay
Blond and Blue–Poetry Rules Become Trash
He painted cocks. He calmed down Arthur when
Another fit of rage propelled the boy
To violence. It wasn’t about men,
Except for 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 male loveliness gives lust a lever, When sunlight pulchritude promises forever?
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 sin, a blond
One certainly. To bring blue eyes to ache
Will always be iniquity beyond
Fortgiveness, 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 were 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”
Everyone 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
At 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 him. For them
Refraction from that jewel of cum combined
With semi-precious, ancient, flame-like stone
(Close juxtaposed with that poetic mind
And blue-blue dual 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 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 Verlaine shout
With pain while lording it deep in his holes).
Rimbaud needed sleaze for modern 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 Romances sans Paroles,
And in this darkness Arthur Rimbaud’s stark
Experiments escaped his blacklight 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 to mention 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 send
Your steps 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 flowed 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 it is 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.
Piercing sex is two cataracts that flow
Together, cutting through two lives . . . you know.
39
In scissoring open legs to give entry
To that other hole, entry bottoms want,
He commands with his 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 ascent
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
Appeared 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 problem is that men, even those 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 romance 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 things 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
By the window Verlaine’s cock 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 degredation, 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 it really only happen in 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 the 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 since its squall
Comes as 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 in this poet’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 by 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 is too much like a sly
Perfume that hints at trauma in the air.
I have a sudden feeling here of past
Attacks now turned to grey, 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 turned into 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 ParolesThe 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 boy 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 the 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 lives too, 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
The greatest writer in the history
Of modern poésie française was slapped
Because he mocked his only devotee.
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 ParolesHow something solid as this man beside Me there dissolved to nothing more than smoke 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
Up from that head, 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
Was in his eyes. They held a winter blight.
75
A Sentimental Conversation
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 so much that he cannot see his way
To anything other than graffiti
Of the crudest sort. 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 pianissiuo.
Arthur 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 tried 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, notched Lucifer’s caress.
Afterwords
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 forced into 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
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
89
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