He wrote this when he was 16.

The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons. 
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with 
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas 
Never endured more triumphant clamourings

The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves 
Which men call eternal rollers of victims, 
For ten nights, without once missing 
the foolish eye of the harbor lights!

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull 
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains 
and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem 
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, 
Devouring the green azures; where, 
entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;

Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight, 
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!

I have come to know the skies splitting with 
lightnings, and the waterspouts 
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men 
have imagined they saw!

I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled 
with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations, 
Like the performers in very-antique dramas 
Waves rolling back into the distances their 
shiverings of venetian blinds!

I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps, 
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!

I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows, 
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, 
skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow 
sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...

Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage 
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!

But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether, 
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;

Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky 
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious, 
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,

Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort, 
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows 
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;

I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distance
The groans of Behemoth's rutting, and 
of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor: 
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those 
bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -

But, truly, I have wept too much! 
The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: 
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. 
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the 
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.

"Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself!" ~ Jean Cocteau

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." ~ Franz Kafka

Technoprogressivism: Beyond Technophilia and Technophobia

Bruce Springsteen, Dream Baby Dream

Currently reading The Lowlife by Alexander Baron. The story of a East End Jewish gambler, the quintessential lovable loser. A great London novel.

RIP Hemingway.

"A writer's job is to be the spectator who hopes he can see more of the game and try to make sense of it." ~ Alexander Baron

"You mean like letting an old pouf smack you for money?... it's just a service." ~ Derek Raymond

Watching Julian Schnabel's Basquiat.

The Sick Rose by William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.