Patti Smith: Poem about Arthur Rimbaud

A poem about Rimbaud- Une saison en enfer- Patti Smith

A face pressed to mine. A black hole, planting a kiss, an uproarious cry. It was not cruelty, not even insult, but a quirky form of universal love, an impulsive great narcotic joy.

I sought my kind & found none. How you rescued me, your peasant hands reaching through time, wrapping my young heart, your poems found in the stall by the greyhound station.

I dogged, dreaming of escape, words I could not comprehend & yet deciphered by blood illuminated adolescence. I wrote with the image of you above my work table, vowing one day to trace your steps, dressed in the watch cap & coat of my present self.

This morning pulling into your town, I walked the streets that you despised. The streets I love for you having despised them. I will go to the train station in Rouche. I will touch the remains of the walls of the farmhouse where you wept.

A season in hell, while your sisters harvested the fields. I will walk the road you raced as a sturdy limbed boy. The road you were carried on with one legged face down on the litter, flanked by misery, who loved no company.

I will be there at the train station. I will piss in the urinal you pissed in. A young man cursing existence & then a dying man. I will squat & rise. I will stand. I will give you my limbs, no longer young but sturdy all the same.

I project from the urinal to Marseille that you gave glory & they just tossed it away into the river. A discarded wreath where rats sit, using it for a nest. Ay Rimbaud, the rat poet laureate. A rat is all I have been, scurrying through the streets of the city of brotherly love. I am where you were & I feel as if i could find you waiting.

Everyone wears a corpse around their wrist. Just a bit of twine, but a corpse all the same. A dead thing proclaiming; I have you & you I will snip all these things & hurl all rings in the urinal. You knelt in your tears, made it overflow. All the sewage covered the station & made you shudder. That was as close as a laugh as you could get to. The image of the shit covered wagon, you stood clad in white, trembling.

This is what I know; I am here for a purpose. The purpose changes. Gifts that are not mine, children who are not mine, an angel who is not mine & this to meet you at the urnial & draw you upright in my arms. I am still sturdy. This memory may enter me & I will realign the clay of my being. Will be you, muscle, shall be ours. All limbs in tact, all brutal mirrors cracked. I am here & that is something. I am here my friend & have always been, as much as for any living thing.