Upon a Night, After Reading Rimbaud for the First Time

There is something about immorality
that touches my heart with joy
and makes me beam inside.

Quiet, dusky motions made
upon a hill at still hour
exemplify this - perhaps better
than these words alone
can re-express, for they are laden
with time and lingering threats
of mirthless laughter ringing
through my trembling throat.

I placate you - many of you -
with my itinerant morality.
Sweetly gaze upon you
with such inward refusal
to grimace. Nothing seems to do
well for me while speaking
with propriety. So I return again
to silence, to solitude, to
chasing a moth around my room,
giving up, and hoping it will not
land on my nipples while I am sleeping.

Perhaps spiders munch into my earwax,
maybe I am sucked by mosquitoes,
It is possible that these things happen--
But ah! How I dream!
How I dream! I could never tell you
How I dream! I dream
of blatant mysteries and insidious plots
and wordplay I do not understand
Why, in one well remember'd dream,
(excavating through an underground polis)
I learned from an Indian courtesan
that the phrase 'mango slice' was a euphemism
for the female vagina. What a thing to learn
in a dream! It shakes me away
from the guile of looking proper
during the day. I must have
my dreams, or else I would descry
reality with all the vehement force
that an otherwise gentle child
repulses the fouled taste of black liquorice.

So, here I swoon,
listening to no melodies
but cradling the fire in my breast
lighted by singeing yellow solarities
and the raw glory
of Pagan Gods standing amid
green harried woods.

It would not matter if every other ideal
were dead, for such things only sustain
pariahs to my faith.

(O, it is a delicious faith!
Formed of much living,
much thinking, much reviling,
much anger, much loss,
much breathing deep,
and much, much, adoration
of the vagaries
of the multifarious
multivalenced
flesh of the earth)