TSM 172

~ qbit 
Baudelaire slowly chews
another handful of coffee beans –

Flâneur-in-chief of all Paris,
dandied dregs of the Seine,

he wrote: it wasn't the caffeine
(of course it was always the caffeine)

but the grit, the grounds
the dirt in his mouth

that brought his tongue 
to press into earth

like the taproot 
of a dark flower.



He lines his cockatoo's cage
(all flâneurs keep cockatoos)

with pages from his books
he tore one by one

saying to the young Rimbaud
the bird sang a better song

out its ass 
than its beak,

that all poetry 
was merde

The Sunday Muse

25 thoughts on “TSM 172”

  1. Old Mssr. B. must have been persuasive. Perhaps, we have him to blame for Rimbaud stopping writing poetry before he was 20? Or maybe it was Verlaine? Anyway, who could argue that poetry isn’t a shuffling and reconstituting of all we take in, re-presented in another form? Alors, c’est bien.

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    1. Gaaahh… the new poem got merged with bits of the old. Uh, might make more sense now, but then of course, maybe just more fertilizer…

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      1. I wondered about that and went back and forth more than once. I thought you had accidentally reposted last week’s, but then saw that it was only the very beginning. Then I wondered if you meant to do that, or if it was a faux pas, as Oliver Hardy once said. Now it makes better sense. After all, everything sounds better en fraincais!

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  3. This is really incredible. What a creative mind you have.

    “that brought his tongue
    to press into the earth

    like the taproot
    of a dark flower.”

    So creative.

    Your opening had the perfect hook—I love those chocolate-covered coffee beans. I hope it was that and not just the plain beans.

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  7. Merde! That rings a bell. Don’t know if French and Portuguese language have common words. But my mother use that word whenever she scolded us as kids 😀 Colonial impact on Goa 😀

    I like the tone of your poem,qbit 🙂

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    1. Ahahahaha! I think in Portuguese it might be “merda”, so probably sounds about the same when angry mothers are scolding! Maybe your mother had an “excuse my French!” vocabulary!.

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  11. Although I prefer ground ice to coffee beans, that texture is a perfect accompaniment to strolling and to be deprived of strolling does tank the mood.

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