"baudelaire" poems
For Max
O cruel, drunken soul, darling tigress,
Come to my heart, you lethargic beast!
I long for my trembling hands to caress
Your thick and glossy fleece.
In your petticoats filled with your scent
To bury my poor, aching head,
Inhaling your flowery fragrance;
The sweetness of love now dead.
I wish to sleep, to dream perchance
As sweetly as death’s embrace,
Without remorse, my tongue will dance
On your coppery body and face.
To bury my sobbing for hours
Nothing equals your bed’s abyss,
On your lips lies oblivion’s power
And Lethe flows in your kiss.
Like one resigned to meet his end,
I’ll face my fate delighted;
Docile martyr, innocent condemned,
Whose fervour with pain is ignited.
I shall **** to drown my malice,
With nepenthe and hemlock blessed;
Placing my lips upon the chalice
Of your pointed, heartless breast.
Apr 27, 2017
Apr 27, 2017 at 9:08 AM UTC
The short-order cook and the dishwasher
argue the relative merits
of Rilke’s Elegies
against Eliot’s Four Quartets,
but the delivery man who brings eggs
suggests they have forgotten Les fleurs
du mal and Baudelaire. The waitress
carrying three plates and a coffee ***
can’t decide whom she loves more—
Rimbaud or Verlaine,
William Blake or William Wordsworth.
She refills the rabbi’s cup
(he’s reading Rumi),
asks what he thinks of Arthur Whaley.
In the booth behind them, a fat woman
feeds a small white poodle in her lap,
with whom she shares her spoon.
"It’s Rexroth’s translations of the Japanese,"
she says, "that one can’t live without:
May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love."
The revolving door proffers
a stranger in a long black coat, lost in the madhouse poems of John Clare.
As he waits to be seated,
the woman who owns the place
hands him a menu
in which he finds several handwritten poems
By Hafiz, Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.
The lunch hour’s crowded—
the owner wonders
if the stranger might share
my table. As he sits,
I put a finger to my lips,
and with my eyes ask him
to listen with me
to the young boy and the young girl
two tables away
taking turns reading aloud
the love poems of Pablo Neruda.
4.9k
~
*Holding court at the Zanzibar,
they looked on good nights
like Egyptian Queens, like Ancient Babylonians.
On not so good nights,
they resembled Brassaï's Moma Bijou -
"fugitives from Baudelaire's bad dreams",
and even then they looked magnificent.
Identity wasn't something you nailed
yourself into in late adolescence.
It was a trick of the light,
and if you were to avoid
burning yourself out,
then you simply let the flames
lick over you
and turned the ashes into kohl.*
~
Dec 30, 2021
Dec 30, 2021 at 11:47 AM UTC
One puts all nature into mourning,
One lights her like a flaring sun —
What whispers ‘Burial’ to the one
Cries to the other, ‘Life and Morning.’
The unknown Hermes who assists
The role of Midas to reverse,
And makes me by a subtle curse
The saddest of all alchemists —
By him, my paradise to hell,
And gold to **** is changed too well.
The clouds are winding-sheets, and I,
uncover corpses loved of old;
and where the shores celestial die
I carve vast tombs against the sky.
Dec 2, 2013
Dec 2, 2013 at 6:13 AM UTC
You, saying love
You, shaman's road
You, a bird
You, a yellow sun
You, Emperor
You, lovely door
You, my Walt Whitman
You, Neal
You, Sal Paradise
You, Pancho Villa
You, La Revolución Mexicana
You, navajo
You, the border
You, the river
You, chicana
You, Mafia
You, redemption
You, poetry
You, Salvador Dalí
You, Picasso
You, stereo
You, love
You, ***
You, youth
You, America
You, América
You, español
You, english
You, country side
You, cat
You, fire
You, books
You, E. E. Cummings
You, Bukowski
You, Octavio Paz
You, Coca-Cola
You, Coke
You, India
You, Mississippi
You, jazz
You, Miles
You, Davis
You, water
You, rain
You, lagoon
You, chest
You, car
You, road
You, reading
You, lines
You, Paris
You, Baudelaire
You, Poe
You, japanese
You, katana
You, Mishima
You, gun
You, rifle
You, cam
You, can
You, can't
You, Durango
You, Arizona
You, desert
You, gonzo
You, mezcal
You, alcohol
You, drive
You, crush
You, alive
You, again
Jun 3, 2013
Jun 3, 2013 at 3:16 PM UTC
I am lovely, O mortals! Like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where poets are bruised to the bone
Formed to inspire each in their quintessence
A love as eternal and silent as essence.
I unite Ledaean pallor with a frozen heart,
I scorn movement for it displaces my art,
A riddling sphinx, on a throne in the sky;
Never do I laugh and never do I cry.
Poets, at the feet of my imperial pose,
Which I seem to adopt from statues grandiose,
Will consume their lives in studious indulgence;
For I have, to enthrall those docile paramours
Pure mirrors to enhance all beauties evermore:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal effulgence!
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 1:32 PM UTC
Women of the ROK [South Korea]
unite to protest the rash of digital camera
up-skirting, hidden toilet cams & dressing
room holes by an avant-garde subculture
whose sole aim is to redefine beauty from
the bottom up; tearing down the old order
of mere very pretty faces for the surprise
the unseen; online ******* poets who wax
romantically; over South Korean women
who wear the shortest skirts of any westernized
Asian country; therefore, where the average woman
is expected to be above average, what could be
better than a possible *** or period stain; [ ],
Rupi Koar laid the foundation [her soiled garments
stinking of Canadian Desi BO; dreaming wistfully
of the blossoming cherry-trees in the hidden grove,
streams of crystalline blood threading through
the golden grass; (dead as if she was [Sleeping
Beauty (on the toilet)]) & w/ healthy [or unhealthy]
doses of Baudelaire, Swinburne, Poe, Sade & Wilde;
this new school of poets celebrating female underwear
& bottoms & beyond; what could future generations
make of various Internet pseudo-intellectual movements
all coalescing into a monolithic computer culture driven
by the embarrassment & shame of its female members
& their ***** backsides & underwear; essentially odes on
her laundry basket, odes on her farts, odes on her leavings,
odes on her mother's droppings & leavings,
& her grandmothers' mothers leavings;
South Korean women are the original race,
their intestine driven by pure lust
[a South Korean woman's soul is in her belly]
Aug 3, 2018
Aug 3, 2018 at 12:53 AM UTC
[On my birthday]
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
2.8k
They say it's not safe to walk around here
You'll see women standing on street corners
Few drunk mortals and usual dealers
Still, it has a unique flair that's sincere.
Interesting folks spotted at cafes
Nights and on weekends, the scene is alive
Best galleries in town, boutiques survive
A form of art, nothing close to cliches.
The kind of place that gives someone a fright
A misconception for some who can't stand
The riveting darker side of their mind;
It's here geniuses like Baudelaire saw light.
There is something alluring about them
Those society scorn, the marginalized.
Judgmental souls persist; not so surprised
When below the surface waits a poem.
The people here have no care in the world.
Whether it's where they work or their hangout
Here, free spirits do not need to stand out
They think lightly and none shall be bothered.
They say it's not safe to walk around here
It's the truth, one must be a bit careful
But this area, genuinely soulful;
Rather here, red light district I revere.
Mar 9, 2012
Mar 9, 2012 at 4:53 PM UTC
And can you believe,
The horrible glee
With which his lips licked.
Dreaming-- carcass picked,
Reveling wholly.
Dismissing Holy
Enlightened beings,
Sinking in Needing.
Black black smack, alack!
I'm a crack-gack hack!
Or, mayhaps, I'm not?
Or, perhaps, just caught,
In nauseous verde waves
Of fanciful raves--
Rants all entertained--
I say makes me drained.
Baudelaire's half-baked,
Chatterton-- cracked
Morally, sorely
Standing half-poorly
But standing up still,
Avoiding the thrill
Of desert mirage,
It's poison barrage!
Apr 6, 2013
Apr 6, 2013 at 10:16 AM UTC
You were amazing, I’d like to think so.
While you constantly scorned your finest poems
I’d squander on the disincentive ruins of a thoughtless mind
coaxing my envy to calm.
I longed to see what you saw and how you saw it.
You became the conquest,
the prize of my eyes, to affection’s surprise.
I started playing with words and sentences I had never read nor said before,
reading Plath and Baudelaire to join in your mind’s conversation.
Always striving to surpass your expectations of me, expecting nothing.
I gazed at you often, marveling at your squalor as if it held great significance.
Infatuated with your capricious mind, your pathetic whims, I craved for your approval.
For you, were the idol.
A far cry from the adolescent shell of a man that I cocooned in.
Jealousy would eventually consume me.
No manner of abuse or lust could explain
this psychotic affection towards your promiscuous apathy.
I started writing poems because of you, they were never any good,
I feared my crudity; you liked them all.
You always knew what they spoke of and I could never imagine yours.
But to you every opinion mattered.
The truth was still writing itself in your mind when you chose to fritter away
fornicating on all fours secretly, desperately, looking for the one.
Would you give it all up to write again?
I apologize for not telling you,
you were my first poem
I couldn’t impress you.
Apr 14, 2014
Apr 14, 2014 at 5:15 AM UTC
Come, lovely cat, lie at my breast
Cease your scratching and settle,
Into your beautiful eyes let me rest
Swirled with agate and metal.
When my fingers caress you at leisure,
Your head and your back's elasticity,
And my hand tingles with pleasure
At the spark of your electricity,
In your spirit, I see my lover’s expression
Like your own, amiable creature.
Profound and cold, leaving a deep impression.
And, from her head, across her features,
A subtle air, a musky sin
Floats about her dusky skin.
Apr 23, 2017
Apr 23, 2017 at 8:10 AM UTC
Ardent lovers and scholars austere
Love equally, in their twilight years,
Powerful and gentle cats, their masters’s pride,
Who like them are cautious and indoors abide.
Friends of science and sensual delight
They seek the silence of the night;
The dark god would have them guarding graves,
Were they so humble as to be his slaves.
They have the air of a sphinx on a throne
With thoughts of solitude they lie alone,
Who seem to sleep in a dream eternal;
Their fertile ***** are full of magic sparks,
And gold patches and sable marks
Sparkle dimly their eyes infernal.
Jun 18, 2016
Jun 18, 2016 at 11:12 AM UTC
My youth has been nothing but stormy and savage,
A tempest of thunder and lightning and rain;
Though glimpses of sunlight have lessened the damage
Few ripe fruits now in my garden remain.
My mind has reached its autumnal phase,
With the ***** and the rake I begin my toil
In earthy hollows as deep as graves
To gather anew the rain flooded soil.
And who knows whether my dreams of new flowers
Will find in this earth washed bare like the shore,
The mystic elixir that would give them might?
Alas, alas! Our lives are eaten away by the hours,
And at our hearts the hidden Enemy gnaws
And ***** our blood like a parasite!
May 6, 2015
May 6, 2015 at 10:34 AM UTC
At my side the Demon writhes forever,
Swimming around me like impalpable air;
As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever
And fills me with an eternal guilty desire.
Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,
Appearing in woman's most seductive forms,
And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,
Lips grow accustomed to his lewd love-charms.
He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,
Panting and broken with fatigue into
The wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,
And into my bewildered eyes he throws
Visions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,
And all Destruction's ****** retinue.
Apr 10, 2014
Apr 10, 2014 at 2:28 AM UTC
In her dark eyes thou canst see thine own mortality
And with her white arm in some imperiously indolent gesture,
Long fingers carelessly pointing -- rosemary, rosary,
Rose petals rotting on a Sunday -- Baudelaire would like her,
With her nightshade beauty and red lips in a frown.
"Fier et nonpareil," like some rue-flowering queen
And not even the dark red of the faded rose
Resembles the color of her voice, a color which can't be seen
Morbid and beautiful and indolently morose
*Et son visage serait celui de Baudelaire ***** rêves*...
Mar 12, 2011
Mar 12, 2011 at 3:30 AM UTC
A Tale of Two Cities, Marie Antoinette, Les Misérables,
Populaire and Jacqueline Boyer—
Van Gogh and Monet and all things the Louvre—
Louise Labé and Louis Aragon,
Camus, Voltaire, Baudelaire…
I’ve been breathing in pieces of France,
Eating baguettes,
Dreaming of their kisses,
Committing the curl of their words to memory,
To maybe find out just why they say the French love better.
Maybe if I’ve established the impartiality to the Eiffel tower and the familiarity of romantic cheek-and-cheek-kiss greets,
I will grin under the Parisian Moon, whispering with some curls of my own:
Je suis heureux.
Jun 6, 2014
Jun 6, 2014 at 11:05 PM UTC
Les être, le cosmos, la terre et le vin
(Dédié à l’incomparable génie Charles Baudelaire)
Les ceps murissent longuement sous l’énigmatique lueur des cieux,
irisés par les ondes astrales du Cosmos et ses grands vents de feu.
Des gelées de janvier aux averses d’avril, le vigneron soigne ses vignes.
qui souffrent des fournaises de l’été jusqu’à la bouilloire dorée de l’automne.
Le vin est d’abord fruit des astres et des cieux, mais aussi de la patience et de l’art du vigneron.
Il y a une magie du vin qui vient sceller les noces mystiques de l’azur, de la terre, du cosmos et des graves.
Il existe dans le vin comme une consécration des noces d’or de la terre, des pierres et de l’azur,
Qui lui donne son caractère âpre ou velouté, son goût inimitable, sa vraie signature, son héraldique.
Un palais exercé saura toujours en déceler l’empreinte pour y trouver sa genèse et gouter ses merveilles.
Mais c’est le vigneron qui consacre ces noces avec son savoir, son doigté, sa manière d’opérer le grand œuvre des vendanges.
Le choix de la date des vendanges dépend de l’intuition humaine et correspond au sacre de l’automne.
Au moment où les grappes pèsent et ou les raisins sont gonflés comme de lourds pendentifs,
alors que les raisins mûrs sont prêts à sortir de leur enveloppe dorée pour se transformer en élixir.
Le vigneron prend la décision sacrale de celle dont dépend la qualité du vin à naître.
Et les vendanges vont se mener dans une atmosphère d’excitation et de sentiment de franchissement du danger.
Désormais le vin sorti du pressoir va murir dans des barriques de chêne
Le bois peut apporter sa chauffe méthodique afin que se mêlent au jus des arômes de bois et de forêts,
C’est sûr, cette année, les forces de la nature et de l’Homme nous préparent un grand vin.
Aussi quel honneur et quel rite magique que d’en boire les premières gorgées dans des coupes d’argent ou des verres de cristal,
avant même que le vin ne soit fait et tiré pour en détecter les grands traits et les failles.
Enfin, vient le moment de boire, comme une élévation des cœurs et des esprits.
L’on ne boit bien qu’en groupe, qu’avec de vrais amis, sa chérie ou des belles.
Boire c’est d’abord humer et découvrir par le nez les secrets d’un terroir et des pampres,
puis humecter ses lèvres afin de s’imprégner des sucs et des saveurs,
et puis boire surtout, c’est œuvre de finesse, d’expression de l’Esprit et de bonne humeur; qu’il y ait de l’ivresse, fort bien, mais jamais d’ivrognerie
Paul Arrighi ; Toulouse(France), le 3 novembre 2013
Nov 4, 2013
Nov 4, 2013 at 10:36 AM UTC
Pop a few Bukowskis to set the day off right
And sip a little Hemingway to keep me feeling bright
Smoking on that Ginsberg, mind is opening wide
Doing lines of Robert Louis Stevenson,
and a Hookah full of Baudelaire
Ingesting Kerouac, it feels good I swear
Coleridge into my lungs, floating on thick air
Shooting up some Burroughs, my literary affair
I begin to lose sight of reality, taking some Cocteau
Tripping with the Kesey, my life is nearly through
A final hit of Huxley as transcendence I try to pursue
But old Walt Whitman, is where I say adieu.
Sep 16, 2013
Sep 16, 2013 at 7:22 PM UTC
*"A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?”*
-Charles Baudelaire, "To a Passerby"
The material of the scene burns and
grays, burns and grays in my mind:
City soot in the frost. Cracked plastic.
Broken glass. Cheek creases where you
said your name. Salt stains on a denim cuff.
Scruff. Tartan scarf. Navy wool. Feather
down, laces, leggings, a buckle. Teeth,
fleece, a crumpled hotel matchbook.
No heat lamp here, where we wait and
meet, wait and meet on the windiest
night. Would you scoff if I said
"Love is two strangers trading fire.”
Smaller matter, now, an Altoid tin of
cherished ashes. I have it, and it murmurs
your lines to me, when I crave that kind of burn.
A familiar ice cube down the back of the neck.
These thoughts have sunken—a bag of pennies
in my gut like a phantom step on a dark staircase,
or the imitation of death in a dream.
Saying something about the lateness of the 16,
You cupped your hand, to shelter the flame.
I try to remember the melody.
The harp strings at the nape of
my neck sang mid-shiver, and you
said something else, which I couldn’t
hear over the choir under my hat.
This missing line is my mind’s one
sound conception of Infinity.
And that’s enough for flint.
A lightning flash…then night!
A flame frustratingly lit, but profoundly felt.
A gasp, a gust like a god's grace, like a song.
Like just enough time for a quick addict’s fix,
like the length of a single, ****** matchstick.
Will I see you no more before eternity?
And do you by chance have a light?
Oct 22, 2014
Oct 22, 2014 at 5:04 PM UTC
You said that I could find you
In the space that lies between
The reality that binds you
And the traces of your dream.
You asked me, "Can you dance
To a poem by Baudelaire?"
"La danse," said I. "C'est la poésie
Avec des bras et des jambes."
Your hands made a ballroom of my body
Your fingers tap-danced on my skin
Oh, and how I moved under your melody
Like a waltzing gypsy violin.
Aug 21, 2010
Aug 21, 2010 at 7:56 PM UTC
As Baudelaire said:
"Be always drunk,
on wine, poetry, virtue"
or what-have-you.
And after sobering
from aurelian dawns
and whiskey-drenched stars,
I find solace in tipsiness
on irreverent magic eyes
from the bottom of a margarita
or a paint-stained enigma
from behind a glass of red.
Slowly, carefully, languidly,
Quietly.
Flirting with possibilities
of being drunk once more.
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 9, 2018 at 4:37 AM UTC
“Women sync up with the moon,
like the sea does,
and it makes them unpredictable.”
he said.
(Surely not –
the sea and the moon are as predictable as you like!
you can chart them with maps!)
“Ah, but how about tsunami’s
that come along from nowhere
and drown the innocent?”
(Tsunamis aren’t caused by the moon,
they’re a result of the earth crashing into itself
and we are the earth,
us men,
and we drown the innocent.)
Every time I look at the moon -
(and I look at it often because I’m that kind of boy),
I can’t help but think of every woman in the world,
of every class and ever colour,
who has looked up at it too.
Cleopatra,
Kate Moss,
Katherine Hepburn,
Workhouse women with broken nails,
Baudelaire’s pale thin girls,
Courtney Love,
Female football players,
And how they feel
(or felt)
just as separate
or as close to it
As I do.
Sep 2, 2013
Sep 2, 2013 at 9:50 AM UTC
Mud drenched months, so soporific,
I love and find you beatific
Envelope too my heart and brain
In a gauzy shroud and tomb of pain
The south wind plays on this great plain,
Where nightly creaks the weathervane,
With ebbs and flows, my soul sings
As it extends its raven wings
My heart is filled with dreary things
As it does when frosts descend,
Oh shaded seasons, my regal friends!
Your shadows sweetly lingering,
- Unless in darkness, like newly-weds,
Numbing the pain of a hazardous bed.
Feb 3, 2017
Feb 3, 2017 at 9:18 AM UTC
*I trekked across the icy shores of Alaska and survived with Gary Paulsen and his dogs
I went on many cross-country road trips, hitchhiking, train riding, and drinking with Jack Kerouac
I shot up ****** and did some time in Interzone with William S Burroughs
I dropped acid and read poetry with Jim Morrison
I murdered a girl and committed suicide with J.R. Hayes
I insulted everyone I knew with Jay Randall and laughed about it afterwards
I meditated high up in the mountaintops with Gary Snyder
I suffered New Orleans police brutality and withdrawal with Mike Williams
I drank, worked, gambled, ****** myself with Charles Bukowski
I admired the beauty of nature and God as self with Walt Whitman
I admired the beauty and balance of nature and city life with Henry David Thoreau
I wandered the desert landscape and sabotaged those that would harm the Earth with Edward Abbey
I painted a world of pictures out of words with e.e. cummings
I loved like no one has ever been loved in this wretched world with Pablo Neruda
I outlived macabre and twisted tales from the mind of Edgar Allan Poe
I spent a few months in France with the cryptic mind of Charles Baudelaire
I drank and wrote nature literature from animal perspectives with Jack London
I lived the songs that Tom Waits wrote
I went insane with Sparrow in New York
I found myself traveling on a Tour Of Homes, reciting ‘Talk Music’ with Dan Smith
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” with Allen Ginsberg*
When all was said and done and every word wrote three times or more
I disappeared into the oncoming onslaught of midnight's dreary dreams
Like so many forgotten poets, writers, and orators
Who’s words have faded with the oblivion of time
Only to be remembered by a select few from here and there
That have chosen to remember, to write, to read, to never forget
Which are you and where do you come from?
Oct 8, 2011
Oct 8, 2011 at 9:26 AM UTC