to put it to the test
I’d never intended
to travel but pretended
I’d do it and instead
read books on the docks
right there at the Bodega
not at Charing Cross station
or smoking black opium
at foggy Limehouse Basin
I didn’t do it, didn’t go
with the flow but instead
found myself at the Bodega
travelling inside my head
At the Bodega I sank
Cockburn’s fine port and guess
black pudding Palmer’s biscuits
under English duress
and drank porter and bitter
like a docker and read
of London’s foggy harbours
with their green lights and red
I didn’t do it, didn’t go
with the flow but instead
found myself at the Bodega
travelling inside my head
I knew that I’d forfeit
my visit and stay here
no incentive to do it
or drink beer in a bar
or encounter damp weather
smoggy fog, a brown tide
dumping offal downriver
and drowned suicides
I didn’t do it, didn’t go
with the flow but instead
found myself at the Bodega
travelling inside my head
I went back to the station
my sensory notation
mapping out London
like I’d done it and gone,
been there and come back
disillusioned as always,
returned with my trunks
to my solitary days
I didn’t do it, didn’t go
with the flow but instead
found myself at the Bodega
travelling inside my head
Black Halo
As an exacting bibliophile who collects rare first editions of books he loves, delighting in fine bindings, hand-made papers and silk endpapers, Des Esseintes’ immersion in the cult of decadent literature is characterised by an extreme love of Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal having been the subject of a trial for obscenity on its publication in 1850. In this song he equates Baudelaire’s person with a black halo, and celebrates books as being far more reliable companions than friends.
Black Halo
Hand-made paper fine bindings
in buckram and morocco
gothic fonts and rococo
spirals like a pagoda
I like leather and silk
finished boards, Indian ink
and Japanese endpapers
in purple and pink
It’s Baudelaire I love
my saint and my hero
his infectious decadence
worn like a black halo
my saint and my hero
I caress books like a lover
sniff rag-paper and glue,
stroke vellum like satin
(if only you knew)
books are my true friends
in the end I prefer
their contents to people
except one black sailor
It’s Baudelaire I love
my saint and my hero
his infectious decadence
worn like a black halo
my saint and my hero
I read Villon, de Sade
and most of all Poe
the spinal chill of his stories
acts like vertigo
I’m sucked into his vortex
by lamplight and stay
fixated by horror
disease and decay
It’s Baudelaire I love
my saint and my hero
his infectious decadence
worn like a black halo
my saint and my hero
It’s a lonely pursuit
when you’re lost in the past
that young man I picked up
he’s just one of the cast
that you meet with to lose
and re-find in a book
it’s the smell of the paper
recalls his dark look
It’s Baudelaire I love
my saint and my hero
his infectious decadence
worn like a dark halo
my saint and my hero
When I look at my life
I make no amends
the lovers I lost
never became friends
but my books remain constant
and I’ll read them again
with the night coming on
to the slow sound of rain
Disease and the Devil
Disease and the devil co-exist in des Esseintes’ mind as partners in crime as he remembers his flagrantly dissolute past. His disgust with the pedestrian and the commonplace, and his desire to live through pure sensation, flavours a song describing his increasing removal from ordinary life as he seeks refuge from humanity. The song also expresses his belief in the efficacy of most forms of deviancy as means of subverting a corrupt system.
Disease and the Devil
It’s white wine gives me shine
the colour of onion skins
with a sugary bouquet
that pops taste-buds like pins
old Malaga and port
seem to flavour the liquor
and the taste of a brothel
I knew by the harbour
Disease and the devil
co-habit in my brain
like a scarlet rumba
disease and the devil
are at it again
Cities change like our lives
what survives is the slow
pain of dissolution
like a peacock rainbow
all the pills won’t reverse
this madness I feel,
or reverse paranoia;
my symptoms are real
Disease and the devil
co-habit in my brain
like a scarlet rumba
disease and the devil
are at it again
I’m exotic neurotic
disgusted by the common
the pedestrian mainstream
who live at the bottom,
corrupt politicians
financiers bankers
hedge-funders czars
and militant wankers
Disease and the devil
co-habit my brain
like a scarlet rumba
disease and the devil
are at it again
All I want’s pure sensation
like sitting in a rose
or eating a human
with a perfumer’s nose
I’ve the money for glitz
but the Ritz doesn’t appeal
and I’d rather pay rent boys
to go out and steal
Disease and the devil
co-habit my brain
like a scarlet rumba
disease and the devil
are at it again
There’s no cure for living
my genes are all wrong
syphilitic erosion
leaks into my song
but I’m alive for optimal
reward and disdain
like a cocktail that converts
pleasure into pain
Saint in Black Velvet
Brought to a crisis by a decline in his nervous health that also affects him physically, Des Esseintes acknowledges that his withdrawal from life and human company hasn’t resulted in the sort of visionary self-realisation that he’d hoped to achieve at Fontenay. Exhausted by his mystic quest, ill and long alienated from the life he knew, he decides, on medical advice, to return to Paris. His most abiding memory is of the capricious relationship he shared with the schoolboy—a brief interlude of happiness within the continued sense of disillusionmen
t that now accompanies him on his return to Paris.
Saint in Black Velvet
There’s no cure for my pain
my insane teens, my depravity
my name coated in shame
and dandified vanity
I can’t do it alone
in my pseudo-ship’s cabin
undo what I’ve done
like a jewel wrapped in satin
I’m a saint in black velvet
going back to my past
carrying my own coffin
towards Paris at last
going back to my past
All my fine-tuned refinement
and the books that I’ve read
and weirdo pulling punches
in my red satin bed
all those contemplative hours
making night into day
didn’t realise a vision
or show me the way
If I tampered with time
like laundering money
plunged a spoon of majoun
into Manuka honey
I savoured the essence
of decadence like smoke
as a foggy illusion
that spiralled and broke
I’m a saint in black velvet
going back to my past
carrying my own coffin
towards Paris at last
going back to my past
There’s nothing repeatable
or unbeatable to do
I struck out in purple
and came back in blue
and my servants have seen
my exhaustive obsessions
and the things I collected
my bookish possessions
What I’ve lost is what I’ve found
it’s that boy I remember
acute hurt in his look
that gold day in September
and his black hair turned raffish
I remember his sadness
now I go back to Paris
to encounter new madness
I’m a saint in black velvet
going back to my past
carrying my own coffin
towards Paris at last
going back to my past
Me and My Coffin
The final song in the cycle, a blues, finds Des Esseintes reflecting on his acute loneliness and isolation in the city and anticipating his death right down to a detailed concern with the state of his coffin. His morbid obsession with his looks extends to worrying about his makeup after death. The colours repeated, orange, red, purple, green and blue, in the refrain, provide an upbeat foil to the prospect of encroaching death.
Me and My Coffin
It seems that they’re renovating the kitchen
I’ll only be carried back in
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep blue colour that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems that they’re renovating my life
I don’t want to be scraped by a builder’s knife
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep blue colour that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems that the city’s now another place
like the network of lines scoring my face
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep blue colour that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems that the friends I had are all dead
and now live as zombies inside my head
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep blue colour that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems that I’m left alone in this bar
that’s really the back of a funeral car
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep shade of blue that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems I made life into travesty
as a cabaret bon vivant dandy
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep shade of blue that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems that my makeup’s smudged by the rain
I won’t get the chance to do it again
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep shade of blue that’s in between
me and my coffin
It seems like they’re renovating the kitchen
I’ll only be carried back in
in my coffin
it’s orange and red and purple and green
and a deep shade of blue that’s in between
me and my coffin
About the Author
Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born poet and novelist, dubbed by The Independent, “British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie”, and by Pete Doherty, “a legend”. Author of over fifty volumes of poetry (including Listening to Marc Almond, Quentin Crisp as Prime Minister and Patron Saint of Eye-Liner), fifteen novels (including Boy Caesar, The Grid and Here Comes the Nice), and numerous volumes of non-fiction, Reed is known for his extraordinary imaginative gifts, his characteristic use of language like experience freshly recorded on the nervous system, and his visionary mining of subject matter outside the range of his contemporaries. His biggest fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Björk, who has called his work, “the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.”
Also from Chômu Press:
Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?
“Remember You’re a One-Ball!”
By Quentin S. Crisp
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
By Justin Isis
Here Comes the Nice
By Jeremy Reed
Dadaoism (An Anthology)
Onion Songs
By Steve Rasnic Tem
The Galaxy Club
By Brendan Connell
Jane
By P.F. Jeffery
For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/
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Table of Contents
Black Tattoos (The Suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby)
Around the World
Superglue
Diadem Court
Reported Sightings
A Day in the Life
ET Conference
Harold Robbins
Peppering Strawberries
Recorded Music
Bonus Tracks
Jumping the Queue
Pink Roses
Bank Holiday
Just a Shot Away
Geranium and Orange Chocolate
100 Years On or So
Workshop
Holly’s Moves
Chasing the Dragon
Come Alive and Burn
Maddox Street
Elegy for Paul Lightborn
Books
Wounded Kink
White Boy Blues
Suck Grease Off Fingers
Vada the Mystery
The Casbah Lounge
Love Song by Jean Genet—(Goldfinger remix)
Nasty Habits: Mick Taylor’s Rolling Stones
Johnny Spitfire
Marta
Voodoo
The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series
China Tea, Roses and Your Sort of Hat
Eleonara Come Back
Ruth Ellis Blues
Listening to the Television Personalities
Collecting Asa (Benveniste)
Selling Truman Capote
‘Sorr
ow’—original and cover
Charles Baudelaire, Voyage to Cythera—(sex tourist remix)
Dorian
Limehouse Blues—(Dorian)
Sling City—(Henry Wotton)
Black Honey
Excess and Ruin—(Dorian)
Sibyl Vane’s Blues
HQ
Hanging On
Ham Yard
White Poppy Blues
Roses and Guns
Pills
Retro Shirts
Shares
Addicted
Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful
Pulling the Cork
J&B
Sweet Thing
Broken Hearted
Global Spin
Donald Fagen’s Top Ten
What John Ashbery Eats for Lunch
Mister Handsome
Just a Shot Away
Broadwick Street
Vauxhall Bridge
Russian Caravan
Sequins
Jean Cocteau Lines made into a Pop Song
Lissiana
Allium
Maroon Dahlia
Sandra
Urban Cannibals
Autumn Blues
Depression Greys
September Writing in the Rain
Honey
What I’m Doing
Street Reading
Elephants
Yauatcha
R.E.M.
Yellow Chrysanthemums
Rock ’n’ Roll Suicides
What I’m Giving
Non-Mainstream
Frank
Ennui
Indigo and Orange
Flowers and Cannibals
Uranian Blues
A Delinquent Treat
Frangipani
Foggy Harbour Days
Black Halo
Disease and the Devil
Saint in Black Velvet
Me and My Coffin