Reading Baudelaire on Sunday
When Baudelaire began a poem,
you didn’t know where,
he didn’t know where
it would end.
Sifting his way through human frailty,
paying close attention
to things lesser poets buried
beneath the borrowed sentiments
of their age,
Baudelaire possessed infatuation
for language and misery.
And he wasn’t one to avoid confrontation,
as his enduring popularity among
the intellectual effete testifies.
How serendipitous he vagabonds
my dusty bookshelf this very afternoon,
in his white satin coffin,
sipping absinthe,
prepared to spring upright,
indignant at the first sign of praise
for his paranoid genius.
Alan Britt
Posted over on The Recusant
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