POEM BY VERLAINE
The sky is—pardon—a toilet,
So blue, so calm!
A tree, also a toilet,
You hold up by the palm.
The cold bell frames the sky where you vomit,
Dousing it with your own tint.
A bird under the tree where you vomit,
Showering all the plants.
My boy, my boy, see what you have become,
A simp on tranquilizers.
Well possibly a rumor but still,
The talk of the town!
—As if it’s your fate, oh how you go
Plenty full and without ceasing,
This, your fate, you just keep on going,
Won’t you ever be finished?
POEM BY BAUDELAIRE
Often, for your amusement, the well-equipped men
Prance around like ocean birds,
Here they come now, idiot companions back from a trip,
Naive and glistening, so sure of their garish words.
An illness reeks beneath the floorboards of their ship,
As if rising out of the blue, maladaptive they come to greet you,
Lazy, pitiful clowns who think they wear the wings of angels
While feasting on each other’s diseases, not one but two.
Sickly voyagers, how is it that they can be so gauche and yet such cowards!
He, not gonna lie, is beautiful—still it’s comical how much he gets laid!
That one even moreso, being as he is the son of cowherds.
The other one, though he has a clubfoot, it is he I would most like to violate!
The poet is as sensible as a prince amongst the clouds,
And it is this that haunts me with righteous temptation which pierces my heart:
I am as sure as the sun itself has a million hues.
Like the men, I, too, am sick with impatience and the giant ocean that keeps us apart.
POEM BY E.E. CUMMINGS
in april
t he po
or the po
ets gather
drinkup
the moo
n)
the like
ness of o
thers oh debra how
I as
pire to their likeness my
crush ha
tes anne car
son & I ha
ve neverbeensoglad
at a thing o
what a th ing
to be thin king o
f
eat ing fr
ied
chicken w/you at
the lo
cal kum-
n-
go)