From “Aftering Delmore’s ‘Season in Hell’ [Rimbaud] 3”

I have gorged on a glorious dose of poison.—Triple blessings

on the advice that was proffered!—My guts on fire. Future shock

distorts and contorts and hurls me into the dirt. Choking and parched

I can’t call out. This hell, this eternal torment. Watch the flames

leap high. Out in a blaze of fashion. [  Je brûle comme il faut ... I am

burning in style ... and working through a verisimilitude of the

now sprinkling the language changes so rapid and the syntax

so fluide we go to Style Council, baulk, a la mode, Vogue, “magic,”

le chic —]. So it goes, demon!

    Appalling glimpse of my salvation, conversion to justice [bonheur,

Delmore, bonheur! such joy such Plato in the quiver] and virtue [valor,

merit]. How do I articulate this vision? The corrosive air of  Hell is not

conducive to hymns. All those millions of sweet entities, insipid choirs

of spirits, all that nobility [“noble ambitions” per nobles ambitions which

echoes repeats refrains mirrors in the next indent of  Hell ... so should be

retained preserved as the chaos of inferno is like good order is like hanging

onto the little domestic tasks of washing and eating even when drink has

one in its grip, surely?] and courage and peace, and fuck only knows

“what else” [if we went for God Only Knows, rather than your “I know not

what else” to tackle Rimbaud’s “que sais-je” we are bringing the domestic

cat into the bushland and tolling the bell for songbirds and small reptiles

calling the feral in the cat the secular to the holy, and the condemning

is in our hands, not the cat’s paws {not claws}, surely?].

    Les nobles ambitions!

    And this still life is life still is ... well, fuck, I’m alive, still! What if

damnation is eternal! Self-destruction damns us, does it not damn it all?

We are creating hell on earth therefore we are in Hell? I offer my hand here—

join me in my selfie. Make community with damnation, makers, all.

Our catechism, eh?! Damning parents who damned us and were damned

before they began to parent—drowned by the baptism. Pauvre innocent!—

[Hell is a construction of the empowered to increase their power.] Hell has

nothing to do with the “heathen.”

    —Still life still alive, still! Relish damnation’s delight later, still. Quick-

smart, give me a crime to commit and I’ll fall into the unfillable pit via

Western law-making.

    Shoosh, shut your face!... Such shame, reproach, here: Satan is un-

impressed with my efforts at rage, so embarrassing, so “pas à sa place”

in the calque of salon conversation [LA- or Sydney-style? direct flights],

and the kitchen IS fucking hot.—Enough!... Amidst my plethora of

failings they despise, they pick out for special treatment my body

wash, inclination to magical thinking, toxic limericks. And over-

investing their lost childhoods they find a purity of truth in mind,

a refreshing sense of what’s just: such clarity of thought, such perfect

judgment,  je suis prêt pour la perfection ... Pride! I have psoriasis. Pity!

Lord, I tremble. It’s the thirst, the thirst that drives. It’s all childhood

it’s all the sensations of grass and rain and the lake-edge where water

laps over rocks to make pebbles, it’s the tall trees that spoke a language

we understood but lost and let them fall and said what a loss but not

knowing a way out kept doing what we were doing are doing, still,

and it’s the full moon the blue moon the blood moon the once and again—

le clair de lune quand le clocher sonnait douze ... the diabolical bells sounding

the elegy over the lake the grass the sand at this hour, at this hour. Mary!

Holy Virgin!... Horror via my stupidity.

    Some honest soul out there would surely offer refuge, goodwill?... Help ...

but I have a pillow over my mouth and they can’t hear me as they are phantoms.

We think of ourselves in this plight we share. Avoid me. I stink of the world’s

burnt flesh, I am sure.

    Cascading hallucinations. This is what I am now: there is no grounds

to history, history is erasure and claims. I’ve no right to keep the facts

to myself: poets and visionaries will be jealous. [Herein a potential key

to the arts failing activism: even in the collective, some voices seek to shine,

and put in the self-defining seer’s mouth: poètes et visionnaires seraient

    jaloux ...

there: the cat’s tongue, the horse’s mouth, mind like a steel trap...? heat

disorientates language, pilgrimage—have pity on ourselves, if nothing else?]

The thousand plateaus of intellectual capital, the wealthy social contract:

the covetous calling the sea a pirate’s [pirates’] treasure chest.

    Ah, çà! Greenwich meantime has come unstruck and the colonial

dispensation has blasted me out of the world to mine asteroids. I am a Tesla

circling the earth. This is the New Ontology—Hell is the Bitcoin shortfall,

the market moving slant, en bas,—et le ciel en haut {voyage to the moon,

to Mars, dark and light sides, sunny-side-up factory farming}.—Ecstatic

nightmare of sleep in our nest of flames.

    If you’d let country define “country” the tricks of colonialism would lessen ...

Satan, insert name here, flows with the wild grain ... Jesus walks

on inflexible bloody thorns, Jesus walks on lakes of boiling plastic. And

the polypropylene emerald curve of the corporate waves gathers his light

in its powerhousecrypt, his brown locks tattered ...

    And now the unveiling of the key to all mythologies: per religion, per

nature death past present future tensing of dark matter the particulars of

cosmology. I am a manipulator of phantasmagoria.

    Listen!...

    I am limitless, I am all talent!—I am nothing and nothingless. I stockpile

my skillset. I can appropriate with ease—the Blues become white consumer

rock that is watered down into “influence” and no return of cultural capital,

I can rip-off dance moves and sidestep Orientalism with swing. And blood-

letting myth filter through rose-colored glasses of fantasy, I look forward

and back and take a plunge for the ring [l’anneau ... who can know what

    “history”

will bring, trying to make it branch accordingly—okay, stacked in a

    
printer’s shop,

the effect is a delayed-effect, but the affect of writing is projection and wish-

fulfillment]? Veut-on? Gold(en) rules where I write and is the universal

    panacea

(we are told).

    “Trust in me, then; faith assuages, guides, cures.” [Fiez-vous donc à moi,

    soulage, guide, guérit. Guide/guides/guide/gid/to wit to woo: this wait on

    faith

this wait of faith this weight I take in finding my way through our “wood-word,”

a hyphenation that could be turned on the portmanteau hat-rack to “wood-

   word”: “word-wood” is from Australian “Symbolist” poet CJ Brennan

   and his failure

to actually find Beauty-Eden he lusted after and the faith issues of elevations

of art come into play as I enact go-between]. Tous, venez,—même les petits

enfants,—because I agree, the kids cannot be held accountable and all the ill

adults bring in making them toil for the right to clean air and nontoxic

foodstuffs and the right to play instead of labor to make trainers that glide

across prayers as if they’re military-grade stealth but the laborer’s heart’s

ease is faith is a faith to learn from and listen to and respect per the cost

of comforts, letting prayers be prayers and hopefully thwarting the adverts,

the thefts of hours of day, lazing in virtual meadows.

   —And me-think, we. What world regret have we-I? By reducing suffering

I-we could suffer {care} less, doesn’t it reason? Those little idiocies of mine—

sigh. Regret.

   Bah! faisons toutes les grimaces imaginables. [Filters making fresh eyes

   omo dei]

   A tower reaches over the city and we leave the world (vicariously), we

leave aspiring gothic glass we leave as design leaves us to aspire after

the sound of a bullet breaking the sound barrier the sound of shattered

glass. Intensifying our sensations we disconnect via sensual robotics

which the Saxonic-bespoke-mansion overseas the wood for the wood

of drowsy willow trees the wood of drowsy Merbau decking barbecue

rollout quiet drink after hard days air conditioning, rerouting night into

“day” and the etceteras of gaming fatigue, burnout!

   I am not excusing myself as ourself, and hell will come equally—the

only equality I-we are sure of—for the fury, the inaction, the false pride

of part-time activism; a chamber orchestra of self-delusion.

   Je meurs de lassitude. [contextualize via inaction, distraction, avoidance,

letting things roll on as they are and hope for the best whilst paying lip service:

“paying”: where is the pacification of profiteering in Hell nightimages?] I am

eaten as I stand, I am the press lampooning the worms in the asylum-seeking

North Korean soldier’s belly, lymph nodes, brain tissue ... feet, I-we reading

in our outsides our one-click insides, you-we equity in equality, “horror of

   horrors!”

Satan, fool, you would dissolve me with your hoodwinks. Je réclame. “I insist!”

a poke in the hole with your missile, gouts of napalm ... cluster bombs ... 

daisy cutters ... sparklers.

   Ah! Don’t think I don’t want back into life. To pontificate about the shit

we have dumped on ourselves. This toxic splurge of damnation on all

of our (my my my) heads, the thousand-fold rhizomiX territorializing kisX

of death! I am pathetic in front of World! What’s left, shed some pity my way,

abject failure of me—revealed over unrevealed [cancels out].

   C’est le feu qui se relève avec son damné.

   {“It is the fire which wakes again with its damned.”}

   [I-we flame-fed flame feed and inflame be damned but wake.

    Waken to the flames and steady the damned—for their sake. Our sake.]