Rimbaud’s Kraken

Citizens, awake! These are not the low, mild

clouds of your usual daybreaks—behold

the slowly-advancing arms of the apocalyptic

monster, already filling with a pink, sinister light!

The city is a coral reef flaunting electric crustaceans,

a lewd feast laid out for him under the heavens.

He will fiddle harshly the nude steeple of the church,

thump the opera house roof in a savage tom-tom.

His music will make the pauper priests and debutantes

run wild in the street, shucking moth-eaten cassocks

and silk-and-diamond unmentionables to careen

off one another like lascivious pinballs.

Look out, schoolteachers! He’s come to suck the bones

from your bodies, to toss your slumping skins

like hobo overcoats into the gutters where you’ll

spend your last breaths belching out chalk dust.

The public monuments will swarm with snails,

their slime-trails a griffonage of queer divinations.

Don’t bother running to the sewers to hide—

the pipes have already come alive in their catacombs, ready to strangle.

Citizens, it’s all his! Your only chance now is to sprout

another quartet of limbs and clear the way as he unfurls

down the thoroughfares a hundredfold, while the paving stones

squeal like spinsters under the thick, obscene banners of his arms!