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Arthur Rimbaud – from Rimbaud Complete [translated by Wyatt Mason]

Muscle bound goons. 
The kind that rape the world. 
Self satisfied, in no hurry to devote their remarkable faculties to understanding another’s mind. 
Such clever men. 
Stares as blank as summer nights, …… golden star-strung steel; twisted features, leaden, pale, inflamed; hoarse guffaws. 
A grim onslaught of pretence.

Arthur Rimbaud – From A Season in Hell 1873

When I was very young, I admired hardened criminals locked behind prison doors; I visited inns and taverns they frequented; with their eyes, I saw the blue sky and the blossoming work of the fields; I tracked their scent through cities.  They were more powerful than saints, more prudent than explorers – and they, they alone, were witnesses to glory and reason!

On the roads, through winters nights, without a home, without habits, without bread, a voice strangled my frozen heart:

‘Weakness or strength; those are your options, so strength it is.  You know neither where you’re going, nor why you’re going, entering anywhere, answering anyone.  You’re no more likely to be killed than a corpse’.

By morning, I had developed such a lost dead expression that those I met may not have even seen me.

In cities, mud suddenly seemed red and black, like a mirror when a lamp is moved through an adjoining room, like treasure found in a forest.  Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sky flooded with smoke and flame; and to my left, to my right, all the world’s riches burned like a billion thunder bolts…

I saw myself in front of an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping incomprehensible sorrows and forgiving them, like Joan of Arc.

‘Priests, professors, masters; you falter bringing me to justice.  I was never one of you; I was never Christian; my race sang upon the rack; I don’t understand your laws; I have no moral compass, I’m a beast’