The Marbled Swarm

The Marbled Smarm
______________________

The Marbled Smarm
Worn-Out Ex-Boy
Publishing Porn
___________________

The Marbled Smarm

“the boner the novel’s
premise seemed to
offer wasn’t delivered”
—Dennis Cooper
Paris Review Interview

His ass—
makes me nervous
till I explore it

Spread-eagled in bed—
but now I want
to forget it

JFK Jr. goodlooks—
but he won’t be playing
Big Daddy in movies tho

I slip him a pill—
I unravel his male talent
impeccable at first

Then limp & weepy—
a knife slices his
history of power

Overrated teen idol—
spoiled fucking brat
screamy saint-like

Dismembered friends—
try to warn him but
he ends up crippled

He keeps posing—
like I was some fan
in love with his cuteness

But I wasn’t—
love isn’t the answer
sayz Marquis de Sade

Snotty runny nose—
loose assed, takes
my fist for $1000

I pay him ‘cause—
I’m loaded, arm
to elbow up his ass

Pleading, zoned-out—
urinating all over
himself, tres retardo

“Hey, thanks” he sayz—
a whole fucking lot” as if it
were a joke, but it wasn’t

Worn-Out Ex-Boy

“There is a
worn-out
ex-boy”
—Dennis Cooper
“Darkens,” The
Dream Police

I flew back to Paris—
saw Miss Cooper leaning
against the Eiffel Tower

She studied me with—
cold eyes and downcast smile,
her face ruined by hustlers

We talked about Paris—
what's Paris got to do
with anything? she said.

Miss Cooper in Paris—
cruising butchy chicken as usual
Marquis De Sade Moderne, my dear

Publishing Porn

“…pasty white straight boys
and the hot women who
love them. That’s publishing.”
—Ira Silverberg, Lambda Literary

A drunken night in my house—
with a boy, San Francisco: I lay
awake. Darkness: nausea.

Gusts of revulsion—
a kind of rancid staleness
stale gusts of dreariness.

Waves of nausea—
fumes of nausea
flavorless, sickening gusts.

Stagnant dreariness—
whiffs of sickliness
waves of nauseous disgust.

The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
__________________

Paul Russell, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, (Cleis Press, 2011)

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm (Harper Perennial, 2011)

Writers write alone, writers write for themselves, even popular successful gay cult writers like Dennis Cooper worry sometimes about getting stuck in a rut.

”I’m really afraid of repeating myself or writing a book that just doesn’t need to exist for me. I don’t want to get to the point where I’m just writing stuff, where everybody’s like, ‘here’s another one of these stupid books…’”—Dennis Cooper, Interview with Bradford Nordeen in Lambda Literary Review (Nov 14, 2011).

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/11/14/dennis-cooper-florid-mysteries/

Cooper’s new novel, The Marbled Swarm, isn’t much of a change of pace for the s/m chicken cult writer who moved from Los Angeles to Paris in 2005.

No wonder Cooper fears that he’s stuck in a rut—the unnamed protagonist just happens to be a billionaire cannibal. The same old Miss Cooper's rather haughty "s & m queen" signature is still there—not much of a stylistic departure in this old wheezing bag of hot air novel. The same old thanatos-famished LA vampire lips going down—except it’s Paris this time, ho hum. It’s hard to breathe new life into that same old gig anymore.

Something new for my jaded literary tastes, I’m thinking to myself. And there it is—Paul Russell’s fascinating faux biography based on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight."

Except this time it’s "The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov: A Novel" (Cleis Press, 2011). Anyone that’s read Nabokov’s original novel knows how tantalizing handsome young Russian aristocrats can be. Exiled from riches and palaces by the Russian Revolution, exiled from cold, shabby Berlin by the Nazis, exiled from gay cultural Paris—even exiled by their own brothers for being gay…

Vladimir and Sergey were quite a startling young pair of princes—their college days in England, financed by their mother’s purse full of expensive jewelry, then Vladimir off to Cornell and fame as author of Lolita & many novels. Retiring early from Academe with lucrative film rights and royalties to the Montreaux Palace Hotel to continue writing.

While Vladimir’s gay brother prefers staying in Paris, already friends with the French gay intelligentsia, living with a handsome Austrian lover, working with Jean Cocteau, connecting through Tchelitchev and his cousin Nicolas to Diaghilev & composer Virgil Thomson, to those aristocratic aesthetes the Sitwells and even to the legendary salons conducted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus.

If one is charmed by the recent “Wilde Boys Salon” frequenting NYC lately, then one may indeed be interested in this exquisite historical Russian salon fantasy fictional account by Paul Russell of Vladimir Nabokov’s young handsome, gay aristocratic and rather ‘Lolitaesque’ brother, Sergey Nabokov.

Saint Denise

Saint Denise
__________________

“I felt the need
to become what
I was accused
of being”
—Jean Genet
________________

Alligny-en-Morvan
Rat Noir
Vulgar Voyant
Oral Sex
Obscenity
Jizzy Journal
Miss Lautréamont
Cheesy Romance
__________________

Alligny-en-Morvan

I was tainted—
And taunted into
Admitting it

Once upon a time—
I was a nice little boy
In my little hometown

But in 1957—
I got mixed up with
Some bad company

Rat Noir

We were both—
Thirteen but his
Was ten inches

It was awfully—
Thick too, as
Wide as my lips

What’s a girl—
To do except just
Open up, say ahhh?

Vulgar Voyant

X was smart—
In more ways
Than one

He had my—
Gay number long
Before I did

He got me—
In his bedroom
I couldn’t get out

Oral Sex

Can you crave—
Something so bad
It’s all you want?

“Go on, suck it”—
he said. “You know
you really want it”

He was so snotty—
His flat runny nose
And big cock

Obscenity

Don’t ask and—
Don’t tell was the
Name of the game

“Go ahead”—
He said, “Say it
And mean it”

“Okay” I said—
“I’m a cocksucker!
Let me suck it!!!!”

Jizzy Journal

Is it possible—
To keep a journal
While writing poetry?

A Journal like—
The Counterfeiters
By a young fag?

A fag like me—
Writing about my
Cocksucking travails?

Miss Lautréamont

A sort of wandering—
Isidore Ducasse and
Lautrémont

An Ardennes other—
Rimbaud drunken boat
Lorca douchebag duende?

It sounds kitschy—
My picaresque pastiches
He thought so too

Cheesy Romance

Miss Cocteau—
Intervenes, grants me
“Perpetual banishment”

Desperately in love—
With an Enfant Terrible
I’m glued to him

My foreskin lips—
His big cheesy dick &
haughty demeanor

Djami: A Story

Djami: A Story
__________________

“In this last delirious
memorandum, Rimbaud
is in Africa once more”
—Charles Nicholl
Somebody Else

1

I became obsessed with him. The boy, Djami. He exuded it—young human backwardness. He excited me because he was so primitive. He wasn’t tainted yet by the Parisian queens. Bourgeois modernity hadn’t contaminated him yet.

Djami personified my puerile hope that time could be stopped and man’s origins could still be kept close. Decadence hadn’t won out yet with Djami. I didn’t have to create him—he was already there.

I didn’t have to write about it, create it with poetry or illustrate it with grand Illuminations. There was no Season of Hell surrounding him—he was handsome, olive-complexioned and a virgin sixteen-year-old. He was like me—before my fall from grace.

His hair was clipped back short in the customary way—what you’d call a marine buzzcut now. The same haircut as the Taromina youth photographed by Miss von Gloeden in Sicily. We had similar tastes.

Djami was primitive, modestly posing for me on the rooftop of the Palais Jamai Hotel. There in the nostalgic section of Morocco. The whitewashed walls with Moorish crenellations behind him. As he posed for me, letting his adolescent primitiveness show itself. More and more, as he trusted me somewhat.

Djami was primitive, a kind of animal-primitiveness. He magnetized me, submerged me in that archaic Abyssinian twilight that showed me things.

2

I was obsessed with Djami, his primitive young maleness releasing me once and for all from the Paris I hated, the Parnassians who disgusted me. They posed and preened themselves, their café society was boring.

But Djami wasn’t boring—everything he said and did entranced me, obsessed me. He posed and preened like the Paris queens, but it was different. I fell prey to something only vaguely synonymous with love. Surely it wasn’t love, I didn’t love anybody.

Just ask Verlaine. I was in love with myself and wanted only one thing. To be a French voyant, to illuminate my journey like Jules Verne did with fiction. But then I failed—that’s why I was in Africa.

My obsession with Djami ended up being my passport to a style of life natural to Arab boys. Accommodating themselves to European men, posing as travelers, traders, slave-runners, gun merchants—usually the dregs of the lot.

I was one of them. Morocco, Fez Djami became the sacrificial ritual intended to ward off the harmful influences and unfavorable fate of my French baggage with its poetry bad history. I gave up poetry as an offering to appease fate and oblige it to help me develop in other ways in return.

After that first meeting in Fez, Djami nude on the rooftop, letting himself he had for a price, then living with me in the Palais Jamai Hotel, everything changed.

Except I learned to speak Arabic languages for trading and making a living with the other fellow expatriates.

Djami’s haircut—a Mohawk quiff over his forehead, his cockscomb of pubes, the twisting purple vein running down thru his right forehead when he came.

What did all this mean? All this Otherness—embodying the full power and source of life-giving energy flowing thru Djami into me? Most of my friends and especially my enemies wouldn’t have been ready for the intensity or duration of my relationship with Djami.

But I made it clear, to spare them, my living with Djami was not a sexual thing. No, no, not that Nanette. Anything but that. I even had a fag-hag I lived with to make it all look so str8t and square.

3

Djami dressed in the traditional manner—baggy whte trousers and a chandrisi, a woolen djellaba over his naked skin. How many times did I caress him beneath the folds of his cloak? His strong smooth body with big hands, a face with a large, broken nose which made him even more primitive-looking.

An Arcadian touch—the faded edge of the day. A sepia touch to the zigzag rooftops—one private life together in Morocco. I can’t say I was “falling in love” because I had no idea what “falling in love” was. There was no stigmatizing pitfalls like in Paris—no catty discussion of classic form, theater, ballet, literary gossip.

Instead there were the usual varieties of typically libidinous words—meeting, connecting, sometimes creating, then going from there. Western discussions of sexuality were puerile inventions of the bourgeois tearoom closet queens. Poetry more or less the means of consolidating supposed talent and cosmopolitan ambition.

4

All of which is became a moot point in Fez, Morocco, Abyssinia. A smattering of talk, but Djami’s oeuvre wasn’t a public collection. There was no Museum of French Legation for small art paintings of Djami in the nude in the desert moonlight.

There was only a strangely compelling talent to be primitive and extemporaneous while living it and doing it. A Muse d’art contemporary opening in my mind. A small, modest drawing of the real, something in common with Klee.

A museum of modern Morocco art was growing inside me. There was a large Djami painting in its collection untitled and never seen by anybody yet. His biography was never to be written, his worldly teenage oeuvre scattered throughout Abyssinia, never to gain the appreciation or disgust it deserved.

There is a photo of him in classic Moroccan dress, on the patio of my home up on the roof. A photo taken by a German photographer, Count von Gloeden. Djami’s profile distinctive from the side, his broken nose more graceful looking than from the front.

He’s wearing a djellaba open over his shoulders. Under it a Moroccan shirt, a gandoura trimmed with lace. His white turban hugging his thin elongated skull.

Cinematographic fictions didn’t follow, only a few photos exist. Photos evoked a yearning for something called happiness, something that’s been lost forever today. I wanted to live a pre-civilized life with a primitive lover. Thirteen years together? He lost his juvenile jouissance, we drifted apart.

5

A last picture of him, standing nonchalantly in the garden at the entrance to the house in Fez. Barefoot, a trim figure, a shirt with the arms rolled up, a pair of light summer pants. His thin waist, an impeccably lovely long bulge sliding coquettishly down along one of his neatly pressed pleats.

The thirteen years we’d been together. And then I had to leave for Marseilles for my surgery followed by my inevitable demise. I left everything to him in my will, nothing to the Widow Rimbaud or my sister.

Sex with Djami had been a quiet continuous apocalypse of myself, each time we made love was still a profound shock. I may have been a poet maudit back in France, but in Abyssinia and Alexandria and Morocco—I’d become my own voyant. Or rather the voyant had become me.

Djami's sheer lust for life and his heightened energy around me. Coming to me from somewhere deep inside him, even deeper and stronger than when he was a boy. Djami as a man was more mature, it came from beyond that adolescent buzz of male energy I thought was the end of the world.

When we made love before I left for Marseilles, there was a knowingness in him that knew I’d never come back. When Djami came that last time and when I lost it at the very same moment, it was like the beginning of a whole new series of intensities. Rather than the end of it all…

Miss Thing

Miss Thing
__________________

“Je est un autre”
(“I is someone else”).
—Arthur Rimbaud

Call me “Miss Thing”—
Not just someone else
But something other

It’s not my fault—
I’m so tres queeny
A lady must be strong

Call me “Miss Quite”—
“Miss Quite the Quite”
“Miss Quite the Quite Thing”
_____________

Call me Miss Spoiled—
Miss Quite-Transcendent
Miss Quite the Voyant

Such a gay Proposition—
Takes courage, my dears
Derangement isn’t easy

Especially in this scummy—
Bougeois str8t society with
Its money, TV and bribes
_____________________

Voyant queenery requires—
Complete & utter abjection
Of one’s queer corupt self

Letting degeneracy—
Debauchery, decadence
Cleanse one’s debasement

Letting depravity—
Dissolutness, perversion
Do its risque dishy thing
_______________________

Call me Miss Chicken—
Clucking at the hatching
Of my own naughty thoughts

Call me Miss Golden Goose—
Plopping down 24-karat gold
Eggs one after the other

Call me Jack up there—
Making love with the Giant
Jacking him off in the clouds

The Drunken Orizaba

The Drunken Orizaba
__________________

The Drunken Orizaba
—for Hart Crane

“Drowned men sank
backwards into sleep!”
—Arthur Rimbaud,
“The Drunken Boat”

As I was sailing back to New York City—
I suddenly felt myself queered by a cute sailor
Moiling down there below the Orizaba’s deck

Surely gaudy young Mexicans had taken—
Enough of me up & down those pyramids of lust
Surely now it was time for a cute sailor?

Huge serpents, vermin-plagued—
Had dropped down their pants below deck
With black effluvium and contorted veins

_____________________________________

I cared nothing for the rest of the crew—
Carrying American tourists and riffraff back
To the boring States they so adored

The azure Gulf of Mexico slid by—
With its ferocious Havana and gay tide-rips
Never have I endured such young macho!

A storm of bliss stirred my sea-borne—
Yearnings, lighter than a cork, I danced on the
Waves men call eternal rollers of victims

__________________________________

For long nights, foolish eyes & harbor lights!—
Sweeter than the flesh of fresh wiggly oysters
The young sailor penetrating my stained lips

Washing me clean of bluish wine-stains—
And the splashes of vomit, carrying me
Away both rudder and anchor down deep

Bathing my lips in the Poem—
Of the Sea, sperm-infused and churning
Into cream, entranced by pallid flotsam

_____________________________________

Dreaming of other drowned men—
Suddenly going down into bluenesses
Slow rhythms under the gleams of moonlight

I came to know his slit, his waterspout—
Spitting with jawbreaker jets of jizz
Fermented sweet & sour bitternesses

And sometimes I have seen what men—
Have imagined they saw, turning away in
Shame, but I wanted to see it all!

_________________________________

I have seen how low-hanging testicles—
Heavy with long violet coagulations
Perform their very-antique melodramas

I’ve seen a young sailor’s face—
Rolling like waves back into distances
Shivering like Venetian blinds

I have dreamed of dark green nights—
With his eyes rising slowly out of the sea
Circumlocutions of undreamed-of saps

_________________________________

And the yellow-blue whitecaps of singing—
Phosphorus I have followed, for whole months on
End, flying fish battering my hysterical lips

Dreaming of luminous fleets of Titanics—
Forcing back the muzzles of snorkeling Queens
I’m stuck somewhere south of Key West!

His eyes of panthers in human skin—
His sneer holds back the sea’s horizon
Bridling the greedy herds of crabs __________________________________

The enormous coastal swamps—
Seething where old leviathans are rotting
In the calm oozing abysses of slime

Where giant snakes devour humans—
Falling from twisted cypresses like dead
Spanish moss maidens with black odors!

Waves of cumly pearl, lips of red-hot coals!—
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of the gulf
Dead dolphins, flying fish far down below

__________________________________

Sometimes, I’m a mere martyr weary—
From all my sobbings sweetening my gringo
Sucking lips like a kneeling woman...

Once I was scudding down along the bottom—
When across my frayed cordage drowned
Sailorboys sank backwards into sleep!

But now I’m lost under sailorboy pubes—
Hurled by the hurricane into the ether
A wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with absinthe

_______________________________

Awake, smoking, rising from violet fogs—
I got bored with the walls of my ratty cabin
I craved young sweetmeat with azure snot

Below deck streaked with sea-horses—
I walked a crazy plank, skies of ultramarine into
The burning funnels of a young sailor’s smirk

How he trembled, feeling fifty leagues deep—
The groans of some Behemoth's rutting and
The dense Maelstroms of his manliness

____________________________

Blue immobilities spinning for centuries—
Longing for Europe with it's aged old parapets
But I prefered the bottomless sailorboy’s loins

I tasted it, the yolk of chicken archipelagos—
The stars! and islands whose delirious skies
Are open to sailors, O Life Force of the future?

Did I sleep, exiled in bottomless Nights—
Millions of high screeching seagulls above me
But also down in swollen heartbreaking depths
_____________________________

Every sailor is atrocious, every sea is bitter—
Sailorboy love has filled me with heady languors
My poor knees, as I sink to the bottom!

Sleeping in his hammock below deck—
In the greasy twilight of the engine room
My young sailorboy bathed in fragile sadness

While a New York poet squatting in silence—
Loses all his pride, flags and pennants to
Undergo a tramp steamer’s slow undertow

The Feuilleton Lyre

The Feuilleton Lyre
______________

The Feuilleton Lyre

“When I was seventeen,
I fell in love with a sodomite”
—John Tranter, “Rimbaud
in Africa,” Jacket

the feuilleton lyre—
goes on and on about
falling in love with that
young cute french voyant

dazzling blue eyes—
face of an angel, those
hands so big & strong,
dirty nails, innocent smile

when really rimbaud—
was a sullen, insolent
ardennes rough trade
hustler cruising paris

faggy miss verlaine—
fell for the kid and from
then on it was str8t
goodbye, hello miss slut

Night at Café Tabourey

“a kind of luminous
ordinariness”
—Charles Nichol
Somebody Else: Arthur
Rimbaud in Africa

was this aperçus—
too much, his glimpse
into verlaine’s wasteland
and the dismal future?

the century of hell—
crummy kitschy new
bourgeoisie world
the feuilleton lyre?

poussin & his friends—
celebrating the holiday
at café tabourey in
november, 1873

pale bitter rimbaud—
sitting there alone
glaring remorsely at
all the other poets

Vowels

after inventing colors—
for all the vowels A black,
E white, I red, O blue, U green

rimbaud invented senses—
that sooner or later would
recognize rhythms inside him

he alone was translator—
beginning by turning his
colors & senses into words

what was unutterable—
he wrote down, making
sure such worlds stood still

he invented new words—
counteracting bourgeois schmaltz
acquiring supernatural powers

he buried his imagination—
inside his memories & he made
himself an artist & storyteller!

Translating Str8ts

immense & calculated—
derailment of all the str8ts
all forms of bourgeoisie

all breeders and
all the breeding keeping
only the quintessence

unspeakable parodies—
which needs patience as
the poet unmakes himself

a minor criminal—
supreme idiot savant
kitschy bitchiness

he seeks himself—
exhausts himself and
dishes himself

gay to start with—
more than anyone else
subhuman strengths

he barely gets by—
lost meanings of greek
dreams haunt him

he lets himself lisp—
inside himself swishing
to some kind of unknown

it turns out to be—
things unheard of and
simply beyond beyond

Djami

Paul Bowles signing prints of his photographs, Tangier, 1990 (Simon Bischoff)

Djami
______________

Djami
Tarominaesque
Zeiss Ikon
Perfect Backwardness
Young Djami
Arcadian Touch
_________________

Djami

“I personally
am content to see
everything in the
process of decay”
—Paul Bowles,
Pages from Cold Point

rimbaud is bitter—
and sarcastic, cynical
verging on macabre

his attitude of—
non-involvement
as silent observer

definitely calculating—
opportunist with a
demonic hustler streak

after verlaine—
and the parnassians
can one blame him?

Tarominaesque

newly discovered—
photos take by rimbaud
tell us more…

more than maybe—
we want to know about
the exiled gay voyant

rimbaud buys a leica—
in tangiers for his new
picturesque poetry

wilhelm von gloeden—
has some prints in his
library that survived

Zeiss Ikon

later a zeiss ikon—
begins capturing djami
palais jami hotel rooftop

djami’s primitiveness—
which rimbaud always
tries to preserve

a power which—
magnetizes rimbaud
submerged in archaic

releasing rimbaud—
from the civilization
he hates in europe

Perfect Backwardness

a force so potent—
that he falls prey to being
obsessed with djami

a boy of the most—
perfect backwardness
exciting in his maleness

living proof that—
one can return to young
primitivo sexuality

djami is his passport—
back into time and
omnipresent maleness

Young Djami

djami is sixteen—
when rimbaud meets him
handsome & olive-skinned

a strong body with—
big hands like rimbaud
a face with a broken nose

his goodlooks linking—
him back to colonial times
morocco & early italy

he dresses traditionally—
baggy white trousers
and chandrisi plus

woolen djellaba over—
his naked skin, hard flat
stomach under his cloak

Arcadian Touch

the small prints—
that rimbaud makes
of djami back then

they evoke nostalgia—
with their sepia tones
faded edges, zigzag cut

the relationships—
between westerners
and moroccan youth…

tales of initiation—
libidinous codes meeting,
connecting, creating

No More Words

No More Words
__________________

No More Words
Chicken Queen
God of Adolescence
Two Parisian Gents
_____________________

No More Words

“No more words!
I bury the dead in my belly!"
—Arthur Rimbaud

no more words—
not those old tacky
bourgeois str8t
parnassian ones

no more words—
i buried my virgin
bride miss verlaine
a long time ago

i buried poetry—
down inside my
pants, you wanna
see it, honey?

i got tired of it—
being a zit on the
zuite zieitgeist
there in gay paree

God of Adolescence

“god of adolescence”
—Andre Breton

even str8t surrealists—
like miss andre breton
seem to have fallen
under the boy’s spell

if he’d met arthur—
sooner miss breton
would’ve probably come
outta the closet sooner

either that or andre—
would’ve excommunicated
the kid like he did to
monsieur rene crevel

the surrealists were—
such freaks, my dear
their panties in a twist
like the parnassians

Chicken Queen

"I think I used to identify
with Rimbaud and want to
be him. Now I think he
seems like a horrible brat."
—Edmund White

not all literary queens—
have the desire or the
patience to be like paul
verlaine chicken queen

putting up with those—
precocious little pricks
those enfant terrible
juvenile delinquents

nor all gay literati—
into being had by cute
dominatrix parisian
hustler poet types

gay poets maudit—
stoned on absinthe
and hashish for long
years after deluge…

Two Parisian Gents

"deux gentlemen Parisiens"
—The Daily Telegraph

ardennes farmboy—
primitive youth like
djami and paul bowles’
ahmed yacoubi

a long, lanky kid—
miss verlaine impressed
by the turid strength of
his thick bateau ivre

vowels came to him—
hallucinating at night
like whispering sluices
thru dwarfed woods

if only those rooms—
full of dirty daylight
and besotted fucking
could only talk…

Djami

Djami
__________________

Djami
Ahmed Yacoubi
A Life Full of Holes
The Other
Djami
Too Late
Two Serious Ladies
______________________

Djami

“The desert is
pure space”
—Michel Tournier
Loutte d’or

this photo of djami—
miraculously survives
gets handed down to
us many years later

no simulacrum—
nothing’s left to simulate
his life has been lived
and so has arthur rimbaud

photo of djami—
tangled curls, smile
not a culture of “because”
rather one of “and then”

Ahmed Yacoubi

“we have a
colonized unconscious”
—a young Moroccan

what happened—
to ahmed the boy
in the photo living
with paul bowles?

what happened—
to djami the boy
in the photo living
with arthur rimbaud?

who knows?—
what’s happened to
all the djami’s and
yacoubi’s in the desert?

invisible boyz—
young men of the
desert who european
men fell in love with?

A Life Full of Holes

“might as well have
been invisible, like
a snake hidden
in the bushes”
—Paul Bowles
The Spider’s House

everything is—
full of holes, all of
it unbecoming itself
all of it too late

copies of “season—
in hell,” down in the
printer’s basement,
verlaine’s in prison

poet maudit—
in north africa with
his life full of holes
doing quite nicely

The Other

“this double-faciality,
this Janus-headed
dream-character”
—Paul Bowles

wishing on one hand—
and running away from
reality on the other,
a line of death

i felt myself—
imitating with words
and my words becoming
my lover on the page

my family str8t—
my brother & 2 sisters
how could they understand
djami and the other?

Djami

“A young boy
(Abdelkader)
smiling”
—Roland Barthes
Incidents

rimbaud publishes—
seasons, then later
verlaine & nouveau
publish illumination

he gives up writing—
poetry for travelogue
bon vivant trader
with djami lover

he becomes other—
a trader, a gun-runner
invisible spectator
djami his guide

Too Late

“Everything
is too late”
—Paul Bowles

everything’s late—
much too late, my dears
i’m unbecoming myself
changing into my other

closet doors creak—
and shriek, it’s much
too late for just about
anything else

come steel lizards—
pounce on me while
there’s still some time,
it’s getting late

Two Serious Ladies

“I felt cut-off
from what I knew”
—Jane Bowles

both were rather—
serious ladies but
they stammered
through it

stammering—
not with speech and
one’s tongue, but
rather with writing

stammer that way—
like gertrude stein
did for herself and
you might get famous

Poetes maudits

Picasso

Poètes maudits
__________________

Poètes maudits

“Slender jet-fountains”
—Paul Verlaine

Slender jet-fountains—
Streaming in the moonlight…
The calm pale Parisian moonlight
Where he grew up as a man—
Young sullen voyant…

Calm pale moonlight—
Reluctant to give him away…
But I had to put him on the train
And send him back briefly to
Dismal boring Charleville…

I had to get serious—
About finances and security…
In the face of Mathilde and
Her Family abandoning me—
Because of Rimbaud…

Nothing sucks more—
Than destitute littérateurs…
Dead-broke with no money
For the usual cosmopolitan
Poètes maudits accoutrements…

The Young Fools (Les Ingénues)

“High-heels were struggling”
—Paul Verlaine

Miss High Heels struggling—
With her full-length dress in
All that wind beneath frightful
Arcades Palais-Royal there
On rue Montpensier…

So shocking, my dear—
Yet a delicate feast for young
Fool’s hearts suddenly seeing
Dark pubes flashing beneath
Billowing blown petticoats…

Miss High Heels falls down—
Young Rimbaud lying there…
Whispering in his low voice
What he always whispers—
What a little male whore…

In the evening when—
Foolishness reigns in the
Café an Deltá and The Rat Mort…
That’s when Rimbaud plays
Hide and seek with me…

Arthur Rimbaud—
Nothing can be more alluring…
Than a young stud in drag
Doing burlesque that male way—
That’s more Fem than Venus…

The Ardennes

“We were alone”
—Paul Verlaine, Poèmes
Saturniens: Mélancholia

Memory, memory—
What do you want of me?
Autumn’s monotonous sky…
Ardennes glare of yellowing
Woods in the colorless air…

We were alone—
Walking thru the woods with
The north wind blowing thru
His long hair in streams—
Shedding gold behind him…

Suddenly Arthur stopped—
Looked at me and asked me
“Your loveliest day?”—out of
Nowhere in that angelic tone
That always meant trouble…

Before he could ruin it—
Like he always tried to do…
I bend down and kissed his
Pale white hand with the most
Sincere devotion possible…

And looked up at his face—
Those slanted eyes and the
Haughty high cheekbones of
A stranger more than lover…
An interloper from Hades…

It was autumn then too—
But the woods were different…
And the sky and air and the
Thrushes flying down and
Around us were different…

My infernal bridegroom—
He gave me his answer to my
Troubling gaze and querulous
Voice with the usual shrug—
Leaning back against a tree…

Poètes maudits
(After Belgium)

“Give me your hand”
—Paul Verlaine
Jadis Et Naguère

The owls brush my hair—
As I lie here near the river
Where he ditched me…
But I don’t blame him—
Nor really one little bit…

It was two years later—
The breeze had died down…
The poplars were leaning
In the quiet moonlight…
Telling me to be silent…

I couldn’t help myself—
But that was always my
Problem—not being able
To say no to myself when
It came to being indiscrete…

I’ll leave him alone—
It was wrong of me to
Follow him here and
Lay the same trip on him—
Even more hypocritical…

Silent peaceful nocturne—
I had my chance with the
Young fierce taciturn god…
And I failed him and myself—
What more can I say?

Love got tired of me—
Always dreaming about it…
And not doing something
About it other then running
Away with it like to London…

The Other Half of the Story
—for Paul Verlaine

These Anecdotes—
Quickie koan master tales
Tell the story better than me
About my newfound freedom
And sudden new slavery…

Monsieur de Maute—
My bourgeois father-in-law
Threw Rimbaud out and
Wasn’t’ pleased with me
Finding out I was a Fag…

My wife Mathilde—
Hated young cute Rimbaud
With his long hair and slovenly
Appearance, his pants too
Short, his Ardennes patois…
____________________________

She was jealous—
His blue eyes handsome
And much too knowing for
A schoolboy, fit more for
A ruffian or hustler…

They nicknamed him—
“Boy Baptist” at Chez Baltur…
The Rat Mort, Café an Deltá,
Café an Gaz, Café an Suíde,
Discussing poetry, absinthe…

The artless nature—
Of this Ardennes youth…
His rustic uncouthness, his
Big hands and big feet and
Total lack of Innocence…
____________________________

And his clairvoyance—
So animal and exquisitely
Depraved, knowing that
I craved him and his dirty
Adolescent ways…

His voice just changing—
Breaking now and then from
Boyish joking to violent
Manly swearing, nostrils
Erect and quivering…

He sought to displease—
A reverse method that
Worked on me, forcing
Me to be his slave in
Forbidden love…
____________________________

The Babylon barracks—
Fucked during the Commune…
Loosing his virginity with
Soldiers and revolution in
The Paris streets…

The premiere of Le Bots—
Hadn’t we put our arms
Around each other in bravado
With me gazing like a bride
Into the kid’s angelic eyes?

I show him off—
This strange Ardennes kid…
To Velade, Aicard, Merat,
Jean Forain, Camille Pelletan,
My poetic partners in crime…
____________________________

A longtime gossipy friend—
Edmund Lepelleter wrote in
Le Peuple souverain that
I was mincing around Paris
With a Mademoiselle Rimbaud…

I brought him to Banville—
Had him read Le Bateau ivre…
But when the master asked
Why have a boat talk?
Rimbaud said “Old Fart!”

He bullied me—
Took advantage of my
Closeted homosexuality
And need for sex since
Matilda was pregnant…
____________________________

I was proud of Rimbaud—
He was my discovery and
Paris was alive with gossip
About our gauche friendship
And the way it flew…

It didn’t go well tho—
Not with the Parnassians…
They were prissy queens who
Saw poetry as chatting with
Other bourgeois queens…

Valains Bonshommes—
Meeting at the Hôtel Camonsë
Or Les Mille-Colonnes under
Arcades of Palais-Royal
On rue Montpensier…
____________________________

Léon Valade aghast—
“Verlaine’s latest protégé,
A most outrageous poet…
Barely 18 with big hands and
Big feet and big whatever…

“The kid a Terror—
John the Baptist of the
Left Bank, full of obscene
Unheard of powers and
Strange corruptions…”

“He’s either a young god—
The incarnation of some
Chicken Orpheus or he’s
The strange ragamuffin
Harbinger of doom…”
____________________________

Francois Coppér

“He’s an illusionist con-man
a smooth hustler, failed
Romantic, skilled amateur
Full of rackets and daydreams.”

Mallarmé’s recollection—
Obsessed with the boy’s huge
Hands, fragments fallen from
Some Orphic statue, proudly
Foully sprouting into view…

But more that that—
Proudly foully sprouting
From Rimbaud’s loins the
New French poetry…
A terrible responsibility…
____________________________

Huge red rough hands—
Enormous doltish feet…
More animal than amiable
Locus of youthful indiscretions
And dubious innocence…

I got Arthur—
A place to stay with
Charles Cros the poet…
In his bachelor pad studio
At 13 rue Séguiler…

But Cros was too ho-hum—
For my young misanthrope
Master who used Cros’
Copies of L’Artise for
Mere toilet paper…
____________________________

Cabanes was different—
Composing songs for Arthur…
“Le Sonnet des sept nombres”
Refrains like “Angel, what
Are you doing on Earth?”

Album zutique—
Parodic, scatological,
There at Hôtel des Etrangers
The Zutistes episodic camp
Like future Dadaists…

Thighs, hands, pimples—
And more than a thimble
When it came to satin-smooth
Mauve-streaked immodest
Oozing pale opal jizz…
____________________________

His asshole was different—
The heavy praline carnal
Crack spread-apart to reveal
What his buttocks concealed…
A manly sullen hole…

The City Without Tears

“The rain falls gently on
the town”—Arthur Rimbaud

The city rains and rains—
More rain than the rains of
Ranchipur…Lana has this
Languorous gentle hurt
Aching sound of rain…

What pierces her heart—
A faithless lover’s lie?
Gentle the sound of rain—
Parisian roofs dripping
Down during a deluge…

Now in London—
The city without tears…
How it rains and rains
All the time when Arthur
Isn’t next to me…

Translating Breeder Lit

Translating Breeder Lit
__________________

But how to translate
Bourgeois breeder lit?
Ah, there’s the Rub…
_____________________

To Be Gay or Not To Be Gay

“Traditional narrative is at once
heterosexual and heterosexualizing”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus:
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

To be gay, or not to be gay,
Surely that’s the question, my dears.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous str8ts

Or to take arms against unruly rough trade
And by opposing them, translate them?

“The seductions and delights of telling
a story, unimpeded by historical knowledge,
threaten to supersede the study of poetry…”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

To write—to translate str8t literature
That great heart-ache of moiling heterosexuals

Their inarticulate flesh consuming us
Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know the routine

Perchance to translate, aye, there's the rub
For in that translation what dreams may come

“Even when the specific poems under
consideration operate steadfastly to
thwart the reader’s narrative satisfactions”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

When we have shuffled off this str8t coil,
Must give us pause—our lack of respect

Haven’t we born the whips & scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, those proud pricks

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, the homophobia

“Novelistic fantasy, with its characteristic
Fetishization of closure, is inimical to the
eroticism of the Illuminations.”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

That patient merit we th'unworthy make,
Our gay quietus but a mere ballpoint bodkin?

What burdens we’ve born, swishing, lisping
Mincing our way under a herero-regeime?

What about the dread of something after str8ts,
The undiscovere'd country of the gay new world?

“If normative sexuality is end-haunted,
all for its end, then rimbaud’s open-ended
homoerotic writing constitutes a
double threat to the dominant
representational economy”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

No gay traveller returns yet from there,
Puzzling our will, makes wonder what to do?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And the gay hue of resolution is sicklied o'er

And enterprises of gay pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry

“The biography of Rimbaud, ultimately
a product of the heterosexual
imagination functions not only as
fantasy, but also defense. It would
affix a definitive ending to a writing
that bears little resemblance to story.”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

And lose the name of action because our gay
Writers didn’t translate the str9ts in time?

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop
_________________

The Gay Art
The Shower
Insomnia
Stillness
___________

The Gay Art

“Write it!”
—Elizabeth Bishop
“One Art”

the art of being gay—
can be hard to master
so many things are str8t

there’s always loss—
with the difficult art of
being gay each day

being gay each day—
suddenly in the NYTimes
Fashion and Style Section!!!

the closeted Fifties—
it gets better as time goes by
the younger gays need me

pretend you're my lover—
lesbos fag hag if you prefer
the art of being gay isn’t disaster

The Shower

“your black hair”
—Elizabeth Bishop
“The Shampoo”

the still explosions—
convulsing your cliff
where lichens grow

concentric shocks—
arranging themselves
rings around your moon

so pretty & practical—
just look what happens
when you’re amenable

memories about you—
your pragmatical pussy
your black pubes so shiny

so gay, so sleek—
come, let me wash it in
my old tin battered basin

Insomnia

“the bureau mirror”
—Elizabeth Bishop
“Insomnia”

my bedroom bureau mirror—
always disgusted with me
never smiling at my tricks

miss mirror never smiles—
she's seen too much of me
my sleepwalker lies

my mirror deserts me—
wrapping my silly cares
in cobwebs of time

mirrors are so perverted—
i’m dropping down a well
there's no bottom to it

mirrors are deep—
deep as the deep blue sea
my stay is brief

Stillness

“subaqueous stillness”
—Elizabeth Bishop
“Sonnet”

once i needed love to flow—
smoothed by your finger-tips
feeling fretful in bed

my bitter-tainted lips—
got tired of trembling guyz and
the same old picture show

no healing romance—
just the same old swan song
men can be so stupid

give me female magic—
making things right quietly
sinking into fading evenings

subaqueous stillness—
the sea as moon-green pool
held in the arms of sleep

Queer Translation

Queer Translation
__________________

“Genie”

She’s so affected—
that nelly gunrunner
slave-dealer down in
nasty Aden, she who
pissed in our drinks
and made our brief
charming visits to the
Parnassian tearoom
such a gay delight.

http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/intuitive-translation-and-experimental-writing-ashbery-and-rimbaud/

L'enfant Terrible

L'enfant Terrible
__________________

“Keeping the visionary and the orphic aspects of “The Drunken Boat” but expressing them in short lines.”—Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
______________________

Deep blue eyes, big hands, big feet, sullen, sulky kid. More anti-social than timid, “notorious murderer” Miss Goncourt said. All the Parnassians hated him but craved his corrupted muse. Ditching alexandrines, alienating Miss Banville, sneering at tradition, redoing Miss Baudelaire in her orphic urban drag. Calmer, cooler, sublime lyric compressed intricate visualizations plunging poetry deeper.
_______________________

“Critics often claim creative sparks fly when the themes and techniques of genre literature get elevated to high art.”—Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

Deeper into feuilleton—beyond merely anecdotal, elevated into high art. Only Miss Verlaine seemed to like the vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty kid. Only savage young Rimbaud encouraged Verlaine to write like a gay seer. Arthur Rimbaud was an infant french prodigy, a modern performance artist already. Rimbaud was chicken deluxe a dominant adolescent who was homoerotically ready, a young gay seer striking Baudelaire’s pose without bourgeois drag. A young voyant rather than eccentric gay bohemian Parnassian queen.

Asshole Sonnet

“Verlaine was weak
in everything, except
poetic talent.”
—Edmund Lepelletier
Rimbaud: A Double Life

it’s alive—
it breathes, lurking
in smutty darkness

it pouts—
it puckers, insolent
bourgeois bunghole

it weeps—
pale white buttocks
pierced by pride

it sobs—
a swamp of tears
in queer quicksand
__________________

it squeezes—
milking heavenly
flutes of candy

soon hash and—
absinthe is busy
loosening it up

rimbaud ending up—
as 16-year-old witty
mocking parisian kid

ask jean-louis forain—
“gavroche” the scamp
ex-communard buddy

______________________

“You’re unlucky—possessed by strange disquieting innocence,” Miss Verlaine says. Pitiful Verlaine—the frightful nights Rimbaud owned her. He would jeer at her—losing himself in nocturnal extravagances to come. He would lie down—let her mouth make love to him sorrowfully. They were at last ready to return to primitive poetry. They had the place—and the formula to be voyant. Rimbaud’s bad luck—consumes him, all his hunger and lust. He cultivates it, he wants bad luck—to nourish him but he has no illusion. He can’t laugh—at anything anymore, bad luck won’t let him. Living as a poet—as more a “project” than a set of strategies. Living as a poet—as different than just living tout court. Living as a poet—as subject to satire fag feuilleton-esque. Fiction depending on—telling stories, details, mimetic dialog, while prose poetry as—monologue placed in between the two. The foolish virgin—the infernal bridegroom, speaking, inventing their gay season in str8t hell.

The Spiritual Hunt
(La Chasse Spirituelle)

it was a stunt—
they’d been plotting
it for simply months

getting back again—
staging a fag farce
a temporary ruse

obscene and sexual—
the letters between both
lovers simply shocking!

poor mathilde—
she wasn’t ready for
marriage as gay sham

princess mouse—
miserable carrot fairy
bedbug waiting for a pot

verlaine without emotion—
everything a melodrama
comedy & gallows humor

London: shape of the future—London as both warning & promise of things to come. Rather amazing how—London society back then was like America today. Exiled communards left over from the (Cold War) Commune—rejecting Verlaine and Rimbaud, their gauche gay marriage. Bourgeoisie right wingers—rejecting gay poets, my dears, such shameless corrupt society outlaws. Both left and right—the str8t bourgeoisie fearing queers as filthy vice destroying society etc. As if society needed any help with that, this mini Fall of Rome—shaming what Rimbaud was worshipping?

“I’m doing some little stories in prose: Pagan Book or Negro Book.” My fate depends—on these books, full of domestic atrocities. More than just the usual confessions—it’s gay pulp fiction poetry instead, all my revealing tacky, obscene vices. No Parnassian ploy, just Parisian dish—miss narrative half-erased, gay characters ruining the young writer, course—skip the boring descriptive and crummy didactic powers, what good is all that for a damned poet full of bad blood like me—someone who's much too instinctive, much too savage, much too gay. Let there be a half-heard dialog in the background—a series of muted remarks, some str8t reproaches. If only some of my—ancestors were gay poets, but no, there’s nothing. I'm unable to revolt—or intuit my inferior gay race, instead my queer bad blood simply flows like absinthe. My stra8t dayz are over—good riddance, I'm leaving Europe for good, I’ll be practical & brutal, a gun-runner, a merchant, a slave-trader.
__________________________

Of course, Miss Rimbaud—doesn’t leave right away. First Season & then Illumination, two books written simultaneously, back to back exploring two opposing warring genres . A a season in hell—mock-confessional, camp, retrospectively queenly. Illuminations—cool, calm, futuristic snapshots, queerly dystopian desert journey. Infernal bridegroom—putting words in Verlaine’s foolish virgin mouth. I beat her, inflict the usual—agonies, fears, anxieties, indelicately reducing myself in print to the seducing daemon, the devil as Ardennes trick—I'm not himself, you know, I'm just a badboy angel in disguise. These rude broad strokes—one sentence against the next, the actual words of lovers. I tell Verlaine—love must be reinvented beyond str8t desire. The poor virgin bride opines—the infernal bridegroom is simply too much for her. Perhaps in Aden, I can find a better lover.

Lord of the Lizards

Lord of the Lizards
__________________

“The boy with fair hair”
—William Golding, Lord of the Flies

The boy with black hair raised his school sweater and lowered his shorts for them to see. He showed the other boys what was happening to him. The effects of the Fukushima blast and deadly radiation. He was a mutant boy now.

The lizard disease had finally got to him. The mutant lizard lord was part of him now, crawling down the side of his leg. It was black and blue and slithery. It was primitive and obscene looking. It was a mutant monster taking over his lanky adolescent anatomy.

A drone robot plane flew overhead, flashing by with a witchy cry. It was echoed by the other boys, crying out in disgust and fear. They knew they were all doomed to the same thing. It was just a matter of time before the lizard lord got them too.

The boy with the black hair tried to act offhand and not too obviously interested. But he couldn’t help looking down and staring at it too. He stared at it solemnly, but the disgust of it suddenly overcame them

“Cover it up, quick!” one of the other boys said.

There were six of them, dressed in rags, boys of the radiation death. They all knew they were doomed, but they didn’t know how long it would take. The adults were all dead, Tokyo just another ghost town. The once huge modern city was now just a Japanese radioactive tomb like all the other cities.

At first, things were the same. The empty streets, the stores they raided for food, the swank luxurious skyscrapers and condo dives they slept in. The stink of death wasn’t so bad way up in the sky, but the stairs were awfully bothersome without any elevators anymore.

It was a mutant virus of some kind, perhaps some form of germ warfare that had got loose. The Fukushima fuck-job was just the beginning. Nobody knew what really happened, all the adults were gone or dead.

There was nothing to do, no TV, no Internet, no nothing. No news about Japan or the rest of the Pacific. The only thing left was their gang, who’d survived somehow. They’d been hiding down in the sewers, but when they came up everything was changed.

The boy with the black hair didn’t say anything. He knew the other boys would find another leader, not that it made any difference anymore. They’d all be dead pretty soon like all the others, and it wouldn’t be pretty either.

He could already feel it, the lizard lord taking over his body. Radioactive malignancy was really quick these days, germ warfare was different now. The doomsday machine had gone viral now, the implanted chips were monitoring everything.

But what good was it when everybody was dead. Even the people that be down in their underground tunnels and bunkers. They were the first to go, betrayed by their own praetorian robots & guards. Down it all came, and it didn’t take long.

The boy with the hair knew what to do. He gave the rest of the gang a smirk and toughie sneer. Pulling up his shorts, tightening up his gun belt. He’d crawl upstairs and blow his brains out, the Tokyo Hilton would do.

They followed him though, his gang of fellow teen mutants. They wanted to see how he’d take it, whether he’d go out screaming like a pig or brave like a fool. They all climbed up the stairs, silent and sullen, just looking for an excuse to jump out the windows.

He didn’t make it, they had to carry him up to the top floor. The mutant lizard curse was already getting out of control, slowly sucking all the life-juices out of the kid.

It was a lush penthouse that once belonged to a rich diva, the favorite of one of the local yakuza warlords. It had a huge sumptuous water-bed that seemed to cool and comfort their young impromptu leader.

The boy with dark hair had no name, he was just another orphan of the times. Another Fukushima freak, resigned to youthful diaspora. But there was no place to go, no safe haven to flee to. How does one escape one’s own mutant body?

The water-bed was warm and wavy. He had his earphones on. He’d gulped down some Quaaludes, shot himself up with the usual drugs. Even so, the lizard god wasn’t going to let him off easy.

The others stuck around. The Tokyo night descended on the city, not many people were left to enjoy the endgame. It wasn’t going to be pretty, it never was.

For some reason, the lord of the lizards went for a guy’s prick right away. Pretty soon the victim’s body became simply a morphed mutant of the guy’s schwanz. It wasn’t natural, the whole genetic metamorphosis was out of somebody’s nightmare.

Soon enough the boy with the dark hair was no longer a boy, no longer the young teenage juvenile delinquent leader that he was for awhile. He turned into a dick with a pair of legs & some arms.

The mutant monster turned everything into a nefarious creature of the Id, the soon-insignificant limbs shrinking like the rest of the body down into this horrible snake-like phallus of death.

Why was death this way—so cold-blooded, hissing like a cobra, squeezing the victim to death like a ruthless boa constrictor? Going for the young studs first, some kind of desperate diva famished for rough trade?

It was horrible, their leader the boy with the black hair. How he turned into a lizard the hard way, becoming a cobra and rearing its ugly head. Not even Maria Montez could have worshipped it, the huge King Cobra of technicolor Cobra Island.

It wasn’t campy, it was cruel. Like the living dead of old horror movies, Night of the Living Dead and I Walked With a Zombie. The boy with black hair was no longer human—he was a killer cobra with a pair of dead legs. His gang ran away, but not fast enough.

It grabbed one of the fleeing boys, the fat one who had lots of meat. The monster that was once a boy, sucked the other kid completely dry with one snort. Then like a petulant penis—it went pouty and limp.

The Lizard looked around, getting a sense for its new succulent body. The Lizard Boy was no longer simply just human, no longer the truant teenage troublemaker he’d been before. He was now the new Lord of the Lizards—at least for a little bit anyway…

Lord of the Lizards II

Lord of the Lizards
__________________

“There isn’t anyone to help you.
Only me. And I’m the Beast.”
—William Golding, Lord of the Flies

He had a long pink lizard tongue—perfect for cutey-pie cunninglingus. The screamy ones especially—they loved his slithery evil serpentine tongue. At first, anyway—before things got nasty.

There had to be something wrong—with a guy like that. With a tongue a foot long—a forked tongue French tickler that wouldn’t quit. They loved it at first—but then later on they always turned into screamers. When the lights came on…

The Lizard Boy could hold it back for awhile—like a mulatto guy faking it, passing for white. But whores knew the difference—they were paid to be that way. Lots of white guyz were pretty dark down there—prostitutes knew the difference.

But Lizard Boyz were different—they could pass too. But once the lights went out and they got down to having sex—that’s when the Lizard came out & all hell broke loose.

The tongue a sure giveaway, once it got up there inside—or down their throats then there was no stopping it. A lizard has a one-track mind & it isn’t very pretty. Before you know it, you’ve been reamed inside out…

The Lizard Boy got into it—he didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t human anymore, he was a lizard with legs. The Lord of the Lizards spoke thru him, the kid could feel his swollen tongue but it said nothing.

“You’re just a fuck-up piece of shit,” the Lizard Lord said to him. “Just an ignorant Yakuza jerk-off.”

The kid agreed with the Lizard Lord, answering him in the same silent voice. "Well, then,” said the Lord of the Lizards, “you’d better run off and get something to eat. You liked Piggy didn’t you?”

The Lizard Boy tilted his head slightly, his eyes couldn’t break away and the Lord of the Lizards hung in space before him.

“What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you the fuck afraid of me?”

The kid shook his head.

“There’s nobody to help you. Only me. And I’m the Lizard Lord.”

The kid’s tongue froze, then he said it.

“Fukushima freak—you created me.”

“What a stupid fuckin thing to say,” the Lord of the Lizards said. “I didn’t create you, you created me!!!” For a moment or two the ruined skyscrapers of Tokyo echoed with the parody of laughter. “You knew that, surely, didn’t you? You’re a part of me and I’m a part of you. The DNA mad scientists did us both in, you child-idiot. I’m the reason why it’s no go. And you’re the reason why things are what they are…”

The skyscrapers shivered again. The ghosts of dead scientists were laughing. It was all so sick.

“Go on, get back with the rest.”

The kid’s head wobbled & weaved. His eyes were half closed, knowing the obscene thing he was. The pig on the stick in Lord of the Flies—was now the pig between his legs in Lord of the Lizards.

“You poor thing. Do you really think you know better than I do? Go ahead and be who you are, misguided spawn of monkey-brained child idiots!”

The kid was falling—down inside a mouth. A slithery serpent tongue was wrapped around his ankle, pulling him down into darkness. He lost consciousness…

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles
__________________

“I personally
am content to see
everything in the
process of decay”
—Paul Bowles,
Pages from Cold Point

Djami

Rimbaud is ambivalent and sarcastic, cynical
verging on macabre. His attitude of non-involvement
as silent observer, even a calculating opportunist with a SM demonic streak. After Verlaine and the Parnassians can one blame him?

Tarominaesque

Newly discovered photos take by Rimbaud tell us more than maybe the Parnassians would have liked to know about being an exiled gay voyant. Rimbaud buys a Leica in Tangiers for his new picturesque poetry. Wilhelm von Gloeden had some Rimbaud prints in his library that survived.

Zeiss Ikon

Later a Zeiss Ikon starts capturing Djami on the Palais Jami Hotel rooftop. Djami’s primitiveness which Rimbaud always tried to preserve was a power which magnetized Rimbaud submerged the civilization he hated in Europe, releasing him into the archaic.

Perfect Backwardness

A force so potent that he fell prey to being obsessed with Djami, a boy of the most perfect backwardness exciting in his purity. Living proof that one can return to one’s archaic beginnings. Djami was Rimbaud’s passport back into time and the omnipresent desert.

Young Djami

Djami was sixteen when Rimbaud met him, handsome & olive-skinned. A strong body with big hands like Rimbaud, a face with a broken nose. His goodlooks linked him back to colonial times, Morocco & early Italy. He dressed traditionally—baggy white trousers and chandrisi plus woolen djellaba over his naked skin, and flat stomach under his cloak.

Arcadian Touch

The small prints that Rimbaud had made of Djami back then evoked nostalgia with their sepia and faded edges, zigzag cut. The relationships between westerners and moroccan youth, tales of initiation, libidinous codes meeting, connecting, creating…

Sick Illuminations

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Djami

Djami

“You go with a mind—
darkened by the image
of a happiness that for
you must be immediate”
—Paul Verlaine
_______________

Djami’s dance & voice—not fixed, not forced. Becoming his other. His ancient crowds—and their idle wealth recuperated him. This dancing boy—returns him to himself, his body undoes him. Djami's voice becomes—Rimbaud's voice desiring him, finding himself again. La danse et la voix—so discreetly fraternal, reinventing love. Adieux Parnassians—adieux Zutique. He'd sought thru zutique an unlooked-for logic, foiling the telling—the usual life-story, getting rid of its narrative. Jeunesse parodies—the surreal detailing of a new biography. Abrupt imagination—silencing the poet with “poetique du fragment.” The other Orpheus—notes, fragments. Incomplete, scattered disjointed illuminations. Leapfrogging becoming—simultaneously subversive via “incoherence harmonique.” A perverted sense—tres gay antinarrativity undoing himself adroitly. Undermining closure homoerotically, eroding str8t claustrophobia. Sweeping aside—humdrum hetero clichés opening operatic breaches. "Nocturne Vulgaire"—hearse of his sleep. Veering off the highway, to the airport of his inanity. A slight defect—right-hand windowpane, revolving lunar pricks. Sodomite slippage—stylish erotic innuendo, tongue-tip up his anus. Pivoting patriarchal—inviting allegorical readings, homosexual prose-poems, eclipsing bay windows—paratactically segueing scenes, dreams, story.

Djami

DJAMI

A young man—Djami. Smiling radiant eyes, endowed with “animal eroticism.” Is that the word for it? Moving toward—the limits of being invisible. Becoming animal—becoming scorpion, becoming serpent? How did he write—how did he flee writing? Escape from himself? Stammering—making language stammer, rather than just speech? Writing— writing in a language not of his own tongue? Traveling—traveling across the desert toward what? For Rimbaud—the desert was his illumination novel? Rimbaud writing—a calligraphy of his sad solitude, escaping the Parnassus pricks back in Paris. Writing “and then”—rather than “because." Writing tres “in between”?

Miss Thing

“narrowing the gap between experience
and expression”—Graham Robb,
“Philomath,” Rimbaud: A Biography

And so Miss Thing—began refusing to embrace any ready-made moralities. For Miss Thing—the seer had become a sightseer. It was all so terribly philomathique—a bored traveler's feverish desires substituting for poetic imagination. And so, Miss Thing became—a regular thug for risque rugged reality. "Emanations & Ejaculations: Rimbaud’s Poetic & Spiritual Testament” by André Breton. Poetry is like Roquefort—the green mold on a dirty boy’s cheesy dickhead. Rimbaud is Gruyére—tart smelly smegma beneath the kid's sullen foreskin. It's the ultimate—divine fondue, my dears, going so well with caviar, champagne. It's simply the divine—the most exquisite appetizer... and then the young moody thug's main course. Miss Thing has always associated genius with stink. Bad smells and sly fermentation, fuzzy love-making and all that. For Miss Thing—poetry cultivates shameless derangement of the senses—deliberately filthy intoxications, smelly deviants—pretty profligate parasites

Café du Rat Mort “Don’t feed—she bites”—Jean-Louis Forain. Miss Rimbaud pees on poetry rather than keep step with the miserable Parnassian queens. Miss Forain copies Rembrandt all afternoons at the Louvre but Rimbaud like Cézanne & Picasso later, studies and copies Forain's idiotic pictures—fairground backdrops, theater sets, posters, ads.

Teen Hercules “nuits d’Hercules”—Paul Verlaine makes out with a cute teen Hercules—nude captive in drag Rue Campagne-Premiére kid who's busy deflowering Miss Verlaine's fifty filthy drunken Thespius lips as the absinthe flows—over the Alexandrine ruins, what’s to be done? Ardennes farmboys—they're not bashful or shy spluging down Miss Verlaine's famished gullet.

Vagabonds “pitiful brother”—Arthur Rimbaud, “Vagabonds,” Illuminations. Impatient to—find the place and the formula, knowing that—“I” is just another word for a cute teenage hustler "other." Just a mere—phantom of some perverted Parisian nocturnal emission? How to restore—this primitive state of the inner self?

Miss Thing

L'enfant Terrible
__________________

“Keeping the visionary and the orphic aspects of “The Drunken Boat” but expressing them in short lines.”—Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
______________________

Deep blue eyes—big hands, big feet, sullen, sulky kid. More anti-social—than timid, “notorious murderer” Miss Goncourt said. All the parnassians—hated him but craved his corrupted muse. Ditching alexandrines—alienating Miss Banville, sneering at tradition, redoing Miss Baudelaire—in her orphic urban drag. Calmer, cooler, sublime lyric compressed—intricate visualizations plunging poetry deeper.
_______________________

“Critics often claim that creative sparks fly when the themes and techniques of genre literature get elevated to high art.”—Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

Deeper into feuilleton—beyond merely anecdotal, elevated into high art. Only Miss Verlaine seemed—to like the vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty kid. Only savage young Rimbaud—encouraged Verlaine to write like a gay seer. Arthur rimbaud was—an infant french prodigy, a modern performance artist already. Rimbaud was chicken deluxe—a dominant adolescent who was homoerotically ready, A young gay seer—striking Baudelaire’s pose without bourgeois drag. A young voyant—rather than eccentric gay bohemian Parnassian queen.

Asshole Sonnet

“Verlaine was weak
in everything, except
poetic talent.”
—Edmund Lepelletier
Rimbaud: A Double Life

it’s alive—
it breathes, lurking
in smutty darkness

it pouts—
it puckers, insolent
bourgeois bunghole

it weeps—
pale white buttocks
pierced by pride

it sobs—
a swamp of tears
in queer quicksand
__________________

it squeezes—
milking heavenly
flutes of candy

soon hash and—
absinthe is busy
loosening it up

rimbaud ending up—
with 19-year-old witty
mocking parisian kid

jean-louis forain—
“gavroche” the scamp
ex-communard

______________________

“You’re unlucky—possessed by strange disquieting innocence,” Miss Verlaine says. Pitiful Verlaine—the frightful nights Rimbaud owned her. He would jeer at her—losing himself in nocturnal extravagances to come. He would lie down—let her mouth make love to him sorrowfully. They was at last ready to return to primitive poetry. They had the place—and the formula to be voyant. Rimbaud’s bad luck—consumes him, all his hunger and lust. He cultivates it, he wants bad luck—to nourish him but he has no illusion. He can’t laugh—at anything anymore, bad luck won’t let him. Living as a poet—is more a “project” than a set of strategies. Living as a poet—is different than just living tout court. Living as a poet—is subject to satire fag feuilleton-esque. Fiction depends on—telling stories, details, mimetic dialog, but prose poetry is—a monologue placed in between the two. The foolish virgin—speaking, inventing her season in hell.

The Spiritual Hunt
(La Chasse Spirituelle)

it was a stunt—
they’d been plotting
it for simply months

getting back again—
staging a fag farce
a temporary ruse

obscene and sexual—
the letters between both
lovers simply shocking!

poor mathilde—
she wasn’t ready for
marriage as a sham

princess mouse—
miserable carrot fairy
bedbug waiting for a pot

verlaine without emotion—
everything a melodrama
comedy & gallows humor

London: shape of the future—London as both warning & promise of things to come. Rather amazing how—London society back then was like America today. Exiled communards left over from the Commune—rejecting Verlaine and Rimbaud, their gay marriage. Bourgeoisie right—rejecting gay poets as well, those shameless corrupt outlaws. Both left and right—bourgeoisie fearing queers as filthy vice destroying society. As if society needed any help with that, this the great future—people were proclaiming, Rimbaud was worshipping?

“I’m doing some little stories in prose: Pagan Book or Negro Book.” My fate depends—on this book, full of domestic atrocities. More than confessions—it’s pulp fiction poetry, revealing my vices. No ploy, no dialog—narrative half-erased, gay characters ruining a writer without—descriptive or didactic powers, a damned poet full of bad blood like me—someone too instinctive, too savage, too gay. A half-heard dialog—a series of muted lips, some str8t reproaches.If only some of my—ancestors were gay poets, but no, there’s nothing. I'm unable to revolt—or intuit an inferior race, my queer bad blood flows like absinthe. My stra8t dayz are over—good riddance, I'm leaving Europe for good, I’ll be practical & brutal, a gun-runner, a merchant, a trader.
__________________________

Of course, Rimbaud—doesn’t leave right away. First Season & Illumination, two books written simultaneously, back to back exploring two opposing warring genres . A a season in hell—mock-confessional, camp, retrospectively queenly. Illuminations—cool, calm, futuristic queerly queenly dystopian desert journey. Infernal bridegroom—putting words in Verlaine’s foolish virgin mouth. He beats her, inflicts—agonies, fears, anxieties, indelicately seducing the daemon, the devil—he’s not himself, you know, a badboy angel in disguise. These rude broad strokes—one sentence against the next, the actual words of lovers. Rimbaud tells Verlaine—love must be reinvented beyond str8t desire. The virgin bride opines—the infernal bridegroom, a blowhard of hot air.