Bad Blood

Bad Blood
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Bad Blood
Bad Sugar Daddy
Bad Vibes
Bad Male Hustler
Bad Chicken
Sham Negroes
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Bad Blood

“my Gallic ancestors”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Bad Blood”
A Season in Hell

i’ve got blue eyes—
like my no-good father
my gallic ancestors

my narrow skull—
my clumsiness in love
barbarous nakedness

my lust, lying, sloth—
a horror for working
honesty sickens me

Bad Sugar Daddy

“Seen enough
Had enough
Known enough”
—Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations

if only miss verlaine—
had been more bourgeois
less poète maudit

a better sugar daddy—
rather than dizzy french
bon vivant fuck up

then maybe we—
could have had a gay
marriage not nightmare

Bad Vibes

“What a fool I am”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Bad Blood”
A Season in Hell

my lost innocence—
my lost boyish timidity
it’s done & over with

i’m not going back—
over that old road again
my flourishing vices

betrayals & disgusts—
i prostituted myself to
the wrong brutish man

Bad Male Hustler

“To whom shall
I hire myself out?”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Bad Blood”
A Season in Hell

i’m utterly fucked—
offering my impulses
to perfection scorned

marvelous clarities—
withering now in some
rotting suffocating coffin

abnegation, divorce—
what else can i do with
myself such a fool

Bad Chicken

“Still but a child”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Bad Blood”
A Season in Hell

even as chicken—
i admired teen convicts
in inns, rooming houses

on winter nights—
i got drunk with them
the same in paris

they taught me evil—
sex with thunder-bolts
between their legs

Sham Negroes

“Vous êtes de faux nègres”
—Arthur Rimbaud
“Bad Blood”
A Season in Hell

my eyes closed—
to maniacs, fiends
and whitey misers

merchants of death—
you are sham negroes
kings, judges, generals

we’re all negroes—
children of ham slaves
dinge diaspora ours