Why Don’t Americans Love Americans/ 6. White Supremacy 1
1.
In summer,
especially, stupid, he persisted
In locking himself up in the latrines
Where he reflected in peace, inhaling deeply.
— Artur Rimbaud
Patti Smith will be the first to admit
Her high school boyfriend was a White supremacist.
Unfair, ridiculous, petty, if you insist, but …
Vision, a product of leisure, is a White man’s prerogative.
Or a precocious mama’s boy, who lived his life under her immense dark wings.
Poetry is all the armor an enfant provocateur needs, if he is White,
Because poets, even those who yelp and hiss, are not a threat to anyone.
It’s not glorious to poke Papa in the eye
Or to slam the door in Mama’s face.
Merde, is only shit, unless you’re a White supremacist, and then its possibilities are truly endless.
So the worst the little White boy had to endure was being sent to bed without dinner.
The worst of poets are only naughty — derangement of senses, no means to no end.
Madness draws no one closer to God nor man nor woman.
Naughty is a White man’s prerogative — as is escaping from the torments of blistering morality, scot-free.
Artur is not Huckleberry Finn, he’s Tom Sawyer.
Artur realized this, and also in time, he’d wipe his nose, and ass, and torch his rags and opera cape.
Adolescence is a White boy’s privilege — poor Verlaine, only a phase, a passing fancy.
Visions are a counterfeit currency, accepted only in “splendid cities.”
Cities he’d find later in Arabia and Africa, when he was a splendid young man.
What shame he would have felt had he knew his work would find a home
In America’s most domesticated spaces: used paperbacks in the hands of high school rebels.
And, in liberal arts colleges, where he would find love in the arms of puer aeterni, coeds, and rock & rollers, all who knew in their hearts that Drunken Boats sink.
Patti Smith will be the first to admit
Her high school boyfriend was a White supremacist.
Unfair, ridiculous, petty, if you insist, but…
2.
One evening, I sat Beauty on my lap.
– Artur Rimbaud.
To repudiate one’s parents is not rebellion, it is not following in Lucifer’s
Hoofprints, it is just another White man’s prerogative.
It’s as common, expected, and ignored as rebellion in heaven.
But good girls love bad boys, and Patti Smith was a good girl
Whose high school boyfriend was a White supremacist.
Hip, hip Harar, the world is my oyster.
In France there was no sitting sitting duck like the Catholic Church
Long ago stripped of God by Danton, Marat, and Robespierre
Mythical, demonic men, who worshipped a cult of reason.
Rimbaud was not a demonic man and his poetry didn’t twist reason.
Revolutionary? Heavens no,
His poetry only scandalized poets and then, only for a short time.
“The I who was someone else”
Feared nothing but his mom’s wrath.
A woman he reimaged the queen of queens and mother of witches.
All that Absinthe, opium and hashish gone to waste.
Was it his absent Dad who stepped out of visions of chaos?
He, the Angel of flame and ice
The “genie,” who Artur followed to Africa.
At twenty, he came of age, walked away from nights sweats and terrors
From pimples, premature ejaculation, and poetry.
Without a so much as “by your leave”
As only someone with unfathomable White privilege can.
Reinventing himself as a man of business, in Europe, Egypt, Java, Adan
The Playboy of the Western world.
Twist the muses’ arms and only money is left.
Patti’s boyfriend became a perfect, petite bourgeois.
All propriety, profit, all business until death.
What did Kierkegaard write, “the petty bourgeois is spiritless”?
So is a spent, fashionable ex-pat, who returned home
A penitent broken by sorrow, pain and regret
Crying out for his mother, sister, and, to no one’s surprise, the Church.
Hip, hip Harar, the world is my oyster
