"RimbaudzMoon," JEAN COCTEAU (vaseline gels on stainless steel, $1800)


Arthur Rimbaud: soprafato
with heartache in Aden
in August of 1880; he
had been disappointed
to the maximum.
Gold Coast. Maxpages.

Oy! Life was different.
They did not have cable. A fright,
a break. O, a split of the rocky fortress
of identity. Odourono. Rolled gold. Between
the movies and the sporting of same.


Indecizione innaffratio
to soap-operatic correspondences. Strong grass
green fire and spring heartstrings throbbing.
Al dento. Benchè,
a very cosmopolitan city, and Aden, above all
a place to negotiate agitated banks of flowing,
flowering life forces, poichè
ebbing and seething
into deep statosphere.

Blue. Rimbaud consumed with passion for Mazeran,
Viannay, and Albuquerque.
Congealed like long ago mustard
and those cold, cold long lost
longitudian linings. Limmings.
Lemmings?

Perforations of the heart, ennui imbuing every hour
with a temptation to go native, run with the gypsies,
and like that. So Arthur decided to traversare
the red sea and to catch up on salvation
in Zeïlah, one British door of Somalian decadence.


Hola! Here it was a new world. A new ballgame.
Brand. Grande. Solid rock of brotherhood. He marks.
He slices, dices. He tags the ancient buildings
with gay abandon. He travels. Plays mind games
on a board.


A hard rain. Briar patches of Boniface IX haunt
his every revel. La beurre. Hard wood. Parquet. Ole!

He makes a funny video with strange,
indecipherable symbols. No one laughs. He goes off.
Voyage days exausted with partying avec caravansari
of the native ones of Isssas and Gallas.


Lights that lead to the city of Harar.
The fall issue of tv guide.
Crystal bleu persuazione.
Leading me.


Bleeding me.
The angels of the sandmon. Men!
Woman. Life Death. Infiniti.


Rimbaud for ten years dreams opium sit-coms,
with frequent rabbet-luppolizzazione ardour
that no restituione could ever restore.
Because
it is only the video heart that soars.

The satellite heart.



Roars. Whores. The bars and the wars.

Station-breaks notwithstanding. And life
is only a backwards march.
Power forward. The dream is deferred.
Did you know that a lot of the race problem
grows out of the drum major instinct?
The stations are signing off.

The signal is fading.

The Crickets seem to say that love, true love,
is bigger than any Cadillac motor-car.
Deeper than any earthy locomotion. hey!

Let's fall in love.




--Marty Esworthy
( variant previously
published in Miserere Review)

---

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