I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors, Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms, Like actors in ancient plays. - Arthur Rimbaud

À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.

(In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.)

Evening prayer

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.

Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,

And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern.

La musique savante manque à notre désir