As/Is







6.06.2016


To Baudelaire: October 1996


Mama’s boy! Compassionate,
ridiculous, dandified cunt!
Right minded, wrongheaded,
unwed slave and parasite!
No poets go to Hell— God
be with you, vulgar and
adorable prick! May your
tarted up, ice-pick nose-pick tales
grow into a grin in the ether!

You immortal artist you—
we remember, who have
been in New Jersey at midnight,
no girls, nothing to do,
sitting through thunders, hurricanes,
what it is to be bored, “to ennui”—
to sling a black coat over our
shoulders, stroll streets in paroxysms,
then into ecstasy, devilish slumbers,
out again into the ocean— we remember thee.