what Baudelaire had not heard. An unborn poet stood in his own darkness, an internal structure of wire, obscured by a bundle of rags. His emotions protruded like a twisted tongue through the iron grate in his stone wall. The stage illuminated and rocky lips cracked and uttered a tangled growth of hollow feeling, a replica borrowing words from the sound of nothing, thinking any stone monkey could scatter commas, crumbs for the pigeons. |
JAMES W JOHNSON