Freefall

Verlaine, ah, Verlaine, je pense à toi. I don't know why. Those French poets, they just live inside my head and pop up unexpectedly sometimes.
Verlaine fell out with his lover Rimbaud, not of course to be confused with Rambo, which in its turn is not to be confused with Rumba. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Verlaine was a little too fond of the absinthe, ah maybe that's why I thought of him - I won't explain that and only one person will understand it, anyway, that same Absinthe that was so beautifully portrayed by Kylie Minogue, 'lovely little Kylie' as Dame Edna is wont to say, frankly about the only engaging thing in that whole bloody film, although I know a lot of people worship 'Moulin Rouge' and I feel like a traitor for even daring to suggest that something the demigod Ewan was in was less than celestial, incidentally I saw 'The Libertine' recently and I found that less than celestial too, in spite of having dear, dear Johnny in it, el Deppo of course, interesting historical figure he was playing but ah, you can have too much of an evil disgusting thing, anyhoo, Verlaine, in his absinthatious state, insisted on shooting poor Rimbaud in the wrist, the bugger, oh well, quite literally I suppose, and of course he got sent to prison where he wrote some of his most sublime poetry, looking out wistfully, should have been wristfully, just as I have just been, I fancied a great thunderstorm was upon us, deeply envious of the expected thunderstorms in England, but no, bang on ten, pardon the pun, fireworks out in English Bay, so looking out through the bars of his cell, him, not me, perhaps the cells of his brain contracting through lack of the green fairy, but then when he got out he must have been straight back on it, tried to strangle his mother,
'quel ciel triste, piste, où va le pâle sourire de la lune, qui me regarde écrire,' was that Verlaine? no, no, Apollinaire I think, Guillaume, ha, funny, Guillaume Apollinaire, but really he was half Polish, had quite a different name, what did his friends call him? Krosto or something, Kostro, that was it, where was that article Simmi sent me about the Polish couple who threw their St Bernard dog out of the window, that was bizarre, pregnant wife off her head with booze, and the husband, threw the dog out of the window, hit a poor bloody passer-by, that's not how I think of Poles, I can imagine someone in Pompey doing that, but Poland, that's not the stereotype of poles that I have inside my head, hard working my imaginary Poles are, yeah, that was odd this morning, seeing that drunken Chinese guy, I was thinking, 'that's not right, Chinese are all clean-living, hard working,' then I remembered the triads, guess they're not so clean living, but then maybe this guy wasn't drunk, I used to live next door to a woman who had vertigo, no, next-door-but one, anyway, real vertigo, not the psychological one, the disease, she was always getting dirty looks from people because she looked drunk all the time, no mattter, then this guy, he sees another Chinese guy, and says, 'Holà!' so maybe he wasn't even Chinese, although the Chinese kids I used to teach were always incredibly hard working, could see the benefit of learning languages, always, always, or do I just reconstruct all my stereotypes inside my head to fit in with the great protestant work ethic? Could be, could be, where did it go? How did I become such a lotus eater? 'Arbeit macht frei', too right, it sure does, who said that ? Oh yeah, Hitler, not so good, that little Austrian, Austria - beautiful, Austrians, too right-wing, except Karen says her friend's Austrian husband isn't, not at all, not at all Austrian, no, that's not right, not at all right-wing, stereotypes, jeez, must stop that, so Verlaine, symbolism, influenced by Baudelaire, Baudelaire, 'les fleurs du mal', divine, divine, flowers of evil, how great was that man's artistry, skilful handling of the French language, cut, shape, tease, twist. And Verlaine, and Apollinaire, and Rimbaud, all of them, in their drugs and drink they take it and shape it, make something beautiful from it, add to their own language, enrich it, make it greater than it was.....

Yeah so now you've seen inside my head, that's how it comes out, like a garbage chute but punctuated. James Joyce didn't use any punctuation in the last chapter of the incomprehensible yet worshipped Ulysses. What's that about?