by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | DE, ME
Imagine a Serenade when the Mind is in a Slump Depression in the form of vertigo Is sickness, mental illness in the shape Of sucking whirlpools. It comes in tow With apathy like quicksand. It’s not rape Quite, unwanted, in slow motion. The suffocation is a prison...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | BA, FO
La Musique de Sade The mathematics of your music were combined With jouissance, jolts of physics known as sound. Your love and compositions were aligned With calculations and the most profound Depressions, melancholia and drink— And passion played on instruments...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | DE
Nerveless Peace Our hatreds and our loves belong to life And not to death. When we are silhouettes Of living things like an abandoned wife, Like outlines left when silken minuets Are sent to meet the guillotine, and like Those ghostly images against the stone...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | RI, VE
The Genius, l’enfant terrible “that inability to look before or after” ~ Arthur Symons Paul held this genius greater than the size His poet lover had. Paul’s larger gift, A knack for living in tight blinks of eyes, Ignoring past and future, made each rift...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | RI
The Bourgeois Trader in the Wilderness Rimbaud highlighted the risks and difficulties of his life in Africa in letters to his disapproving mother. “This last expedition has exhausted me so much that I often lie in the sun, immobile like an unfeeling stone,” he wrote....
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | RI, VE
Sacrificial Investments “In exile, life was a stage where literature’s masterpieces were played out,” the poet wrote in “Illuminations,” several years before moving to Harar. “I could share untold riches that remain unknown.” ...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | RI, VE
The Blankness of the Prosaic “like an unfeeling stone” ~ Arthur Rimbaud while in Harar What turns a teenage poet into stone Without emotion? Maybe in the nest He made there he had banished joy and groan. Perhaps he planted rocks inside his chest To make the desert...
by phillipw | Oct 14, 2019 | LO, RI, VE
Watered Down Wine “My life would always be too ungovernable to be devoted to strength and beauty.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud That’s why he chose Verlaine. This Rimbaud deemed Himself unworthy, incapable of Superior phenomena. He steamed With second-rate...
