Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/540720.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Total_Eclipse_(1995), Poets_RPF
  Relationship:
      Arthur_Rimbaud/Paul_Verlaine
  Additional Tags:
      First_Time
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-10-19 Chapters: 3/3 Words: 5449
****** Ecstasies ******
by lulahbelle
Summary
     Arthur attempts to control his own destiny.
Notes
     I wrote this in 2007. This being a three chapter fic based on the
     film Total Eclipse which stars Leonardo DiCaprio/David Thewlis about
     the relationship between French poets Arthur Rimbaud/Paul Verlaine.
     As much as I've read about the real life historical figures the film
     sticks seems to stick relatively close to their real life characters
     so I spose this could be classed as RPF too if you chose to read it
     that way.
     It's a bit meandering and muddled.
     Rimbaud is not underage where I am but maybe he is where you are.
***** Chapter 1 *****
As soon as he woke he placed his face somewhere where his mother could not see
it.
Sometimes, spirited, he would make his way to the dry clay mud tracks that
would lead far away, but most of the time, like today, he was content to escape
to somewhere closer.
Their barn had been a makeshift school room for the boy and his brother back
when their mother had taught them language.
There his studious past awakened within the present and soon, the middle of a
discarded desk growing too small for him, contained a sheet of poetry and a
depleted ink well.
The humours responsible for his writing were still young, carelessly liquid
words had fountained from them.
Still as he turned his pointed face down to hover closely over this page of
words he narrowed already slim eyes at the pores clogged with ink with
displeasure.
There was some underlying souring to his spring that was not wily enough to
escape uncounted by his guts.
He had the peculiar sensation that somehow the stale, straw landscapes of his
mother's farm, the conventions of her life, had woven their spirit into a lot
of the words he had selected. They read back to him as convenient, obvious,
safe. He was wretchedly disappointed in himself.
His mother's dull devotion to Catholic duty, had been for some time slavish and
knowing that his mind was not consistently strong enough to ward against it,
Arthur had long suspected that he might not indefinitely escape a similar fate.
He could too easily imagine his future self, driven to breathless prayer
directed at a deity that only his fear believed in. This threat of religion
filled him with horror and terror, because intuition envisaged that his verse,
once so beautifully unencumbered by dread and justification would gnarl then
into something ugly or moral.
Both words summoned equal disgust to the pale creature as to him they dwelt
within the same seed.
He felt now as though what was happening now might be the beginning of the
process. He felt the echos of frustration that would flicker over him like fire
unless he did something to prevent it.
It was fresh, novel life and experience that he needed, every experience.
He needed to fill his head and thus his writing until the Lord would not fit.
It was this moment, near the beginning of the day in the Spring of his 17th
year that he was struck by a wave of restlessness more desperate and thus more
intelligent than those that had preceded it. He simply had to act, to get far
away and for good but he realised now that he could not run away, because
everytime in the past he had been brought back and to a mother who policed his
hours even more.
This was the mood that had led Arthur to send a letter to the decadent Paul
Verlaine, great writer of the cities with want to be plucked from his roots.
Within a week Verlaine's reply sat in Arthur Rimbaud's idle writing hand.
He had sent him a train ticket, offered him room and board too, a start in the
literary world.
Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.
Further on the topic of this enthusiasm, the man promised to plant kisses upon
the Rimbaud's hand when he arrived in adoration of the poetry he'd sent him.
Normal men didn't shed such sentiments. Rimbaud knew his mother pious and
suspicious of undue attention would be horrified but he relied on that
disapproval, built on it in his nerves and imagination until Verlaine's house
beckoned irresistibly exotic and special to him. Like the lush, emerald fields
of the rain forests that he'd read of in stolen, destroyed books. He had to go
at once, instantly, urgently, now. The young man folded the letter, then shred
it calmly with intention hard set though every gesture he made to the outside
world. Still his external gestures were mute and rare enough to be missed by
his bewildered mother who would not know where her son had gone to for some
weeks.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Summary
     Rimbaud arrives at Verlaine's abode, learns more about his host and
     sets about manipulating him.
The bright light of daybreak made Rimbaud's spikes of unwashed hair the colour
of dry soil when, with the past month's growth aching in his legs, he set off
on his lonely hike to the train station.
It would be an arduously long journey to achieve liberty from the dry scrubland
of his mother's farm and that of the surrounding neighbours, this much he knew
from previous escapes, so as his legs walked his mind was no less active,
encouraging him all the way.
The gratitude he felt towards Verlaine manifested as a motivating love.
Alchemistic connections between spirits and nature and other such magical
concepts captivated Rimbaud now as much now aged 16 and a half as they had when
he was a very little boy. So when a brisk wind flapped around him, seeming to
propel him to his destination, he grew easily convinced that it was Verlaine's
beckoning touch.
The thought comforted him so much that it made his stiff walk into a fast
stride which almost broke out into an even faster run.
As he made into the busy town centre, his mind, preoccupied by it's own
voluminous business, leant a vacant, simple look to his iced blue eyes which
might have tempted some of his fellow travellers to pick his pockets, if it had
seemed at all as if his shabby clothes might have concealed anything.
Thankfully though he passed the day unmolested, except by eyes of a few
soldiers who my have recognised him from previous days.
After a while of walking amongst people, his own gaze fell upon the proper,
pretty girls who walked past him ignorantly, their backs bent straight by
corsets, buffered from the world by watery clouds of scent. He remarked to
himself upon watching the hoards of them that they were on their way to places
that he might never visit, to a life he would never know and the simple thought
of this made him wish he could be they so much that he quickly grew jealous.
He almost forgot his own prospective adventure.
He always wanted to be somewhere were he wasn't going to.
 
***
On the train, sometimes rain pattered on the top of his carriage and he heard
the muted shrieks of wind pulling it around every so often. It irritated him so
in self amusement he attempted to command it all to cease with his will and his
mind.
Although this game had seemed at the time like another harmless act of
imagination, in time it would seem to have pre-empted the role he imagined for
himself in his new mentor's life.
***
Verlaine, upon introduction, had a much more stable, linear life than Rimbaud
had thought was possible in tandem with any writing ability - so much had he
built the artist in his own image. Verlaine did all he did with a superficial
slither of formality, even though it was obvious from the fact that Rimbaud was
there at all, that his host was hardly a man of convention.
This artist was nonetheless married, and introduced the dirty boy to his small,
child-like wife Mathilde, who inspired the boy's instant antipathy for she had
the same dark brown cow eyes and bird like face as his mother. Then in addition
she was also, hugely pregnant and yet dressed in a finery that consisted of
many skirts of lace, which rather stood out Verlaine's shabby attempts to be
well dressed at her side, in his jacket that was rimmed in worn away suede. How
she demonstrated her wealth to be far in advance of her husband's Rimbaud
didn't like for Verlaine's sense of shame, but more in fact for his own.
Verlaine was deeply embroiled in the social scene of poetry. Desirous of being
respected by other writers, his host would attend readings.
A few evenings after Rimbaud's arrival he brought the boy on such a outing,
where driven by his own mentality to a fault, in square and diamond rooms full
of backwashed smoke and equally spent people, a sober Rimbaud just felt ill at
ease.
Disdain shifted a cross through every piece of information that his natural
curiosity lifted from his surroundings but the boy poet played along without
tantrum of any kind at this early stage.
He showed this pleasingly docile side to Verlaine in the hopes that the other
man would take him to heart. He had even dressed for their outing in the way
that Paul thought was best and wore a thin sash of black fabric in a bow at his
collar, even though he thought it looked ridiculous.
Rimbaud would accept anything to stay there, Paris was too interesting to be
sent back. Poetry wrote itself in his brain the very moment the train had
pulled into the station. The emotions he felt, amazement, amusement, fear,
overwhelmed him such that it would make his art more intense.
It was the dirty streets, people spilling from every dark corner into them to
take baths in the rain. The crazy characters who would scream and shout
obscenities who endlessly transfixed him as they drove him to agreeing with
their ill reasoned rants, or just to wondering what pain had occurred to them
to make such sound necessary, almost as often as he flexed back in disgust.
In truth, over the days of observation, the young boy found it scarcely a
hardship to exercise tolerance towards the elder poet's clinging to society,
because he suspected that it was one foisted upon dear Paul by his young wife
and those others like her that he allowed undue influence over him.
This made the precocious creature quiet and unworried because he was sure that
he would eventually occupy that role in the other man's life. In fact the more
he saw of Paul the more Arthur wanted them to one day be of one mind. Whilst he
was sure that at first his work would suffer the influence of Paul, he thought
that in time they could come to a point where being together was as good as
being alone.
He had faith in everything that he craved, it was the only religion he would
willingly submit to.
Scarcely for compromise Rimbaud began to relax and after much urging from his
already drunken companion brought the offered absinthe to his lips.
The sour taste of the verdant alcohol spooked over his young tongue powerfully,
robbing him of breath and clinging freezingly to the soft tissues in his
throat. This seizure nearly made him cough desperately, but he chose not to
breath instead. He wouldn't surrender a rasp of weakness to this room or to the
company that polluted it, as to be unsophisticated before such bourgeois
philistines as the other poet's surrounding them would have caused him death in
shame.
The alcohol whipped him hard with instant affect and Rimbaud's body began to
burn from the inside, taken by a high fever. As Verlaine's silly speech
competed for attention, Arthur blinked, and Verlaine's face seemed as though it
hung suspended and undulating before him, just a blank white pane of
indeterminate substance with interesting dents. He blinked again and it was
gone and Verlaine's eyes became again what they always were, visible, glossy
and clear blue without carbuncles or streaks and protected above and below by
insipidly pure, thin skin full of veins, stressed cornflower blue from filling
that articulated brain of his beneath his balding dome.
Arthur had once read that it was the eyes that revealed the ancient spirit
animal that that the Gods had donated to inhabit us. He remembered this now as
he gazed at Paul and also how he had read that whilst crouching on an ill-
tempered knee which had been banged into blackness by falls with the motley
youths in the village whom his mother had forbidden him to take up with.
He clung to that moment and sentiment now for a spell before mentally thumbing
his nose at such rubbish.
Romantic bull's shit
Verlaine's body and face, especially his eyes were undoubtedly underwhelming to
anyone searching for useless beauty and yet Arthur knew that he was not a man
whose spirit was capable of underwhelming him.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Summary
     And so they connect, by that I mean dialogue, erraticness and
     sexytiems.
"If you were older I should say I aspired to write like you," Verlaine said.
"Older? My age is irrelevant, a triviality, you should know that, you judged
your wife of my age as well equipped to serve you as any women twice hers?"
"I did do that once yes, but now I see she is too young." Verlaine returned
calmly.
"Ah, so because she lacks in her youth you presume I will too?"
"She scarcely fails me for I've grown to enjoy seeing her try so very hard in
order to fail."
"Well don't worry, I refuse to stop at trying. I don't care for idle attempts.
If I were your wife, I wouldn't stop until I had made you happy," Rimbaud said
with cool directness.
"You wouldn't be the type I chose for a wife unless you could be emptied of
your mind. I married Mathilde based solely upon her appearance, for the
pleasures of her flesh. Although you quite ably match her for the physical with
your fair face and figure."
Rimbaud was silent wondering what such an undue compliment meant, certainly it
was a confession of the sexual perversion that had been rumoured, but it also
seemed like some insult.
"You shouldn't be the type anyone would chose for a husband," Rimbaud said, "It
seems I disrespect Mathilde even more now than I did upon my arrival."
"You don't think she's beautiful?" Verlaine said willfully misunderstanding
him.
"I was not referring to that level of disrespect but no, I don't think she is
beautiful. Demonstrably I don't believe beauty to be the reserve of external
grace. You've read my writings, rhyme is not chief of my concerns because
surface is meaningless to me."
"But I found your rhyming to be exquisite, a thing of true beauty." Verlaine
said.
The pink purse of his mouth beneath his moustache, struck Rimbaud as the
breaking out of a ghastly self indulgence. "Should I prepare for my hand to be
covered with kisses?" He asked sarcastically, intimating his disgust.
"Oh yes, I apologise for that letter, I was most drunk at the time I wrote it
and my quarters were populated by a great many friends so that I could not
concentrate on sobriety. I regret any undue affection, I'm most sorry if it
made you at all afraid to come."
Verlaine's face turned serious with fear and regret as he said this. Now that
he had seen the emotion in another's face Rimbaud regretted his revulsion
towards him as a relic of his mother's discipline and training.
Newly enamored he said instead,"I think if I were afraid to come I would be a
different person and certainly no kind of artist. If anything, I believe I was
looking forward to the kisses most of all" He tried not to appear flirtatious
with this comment but was almost aware of it floating free from him.
His interest piqued, Verlaine moved in closer to the table and it seemed as
though the incessant buzz of unwelcome noise around them cut out for the young
boy, as he replied with an emboldened flirtatious glee.
"And still? Seeing my pathetic wreck of a form would you still welcome them? Is
physical grace so disowned by you that you would permit me to kiss you on your
face perhaps, instead of the hand?"
"You mean to challenge me?" the young boy asked.
"Oh not necessarily, don't presume that I wasn't just directly curious, I am
quite capable of it you know." Verlaine said his sly smile instant, sketching
the lewdness of his soul.
"Well in that case it seems scarcely a decent question for me to answer aloud."
"Why?"
"I'm afraid of being provocative."
Rimbaud had been a good boy once, his mother's star student, a person who
should not want some immoral conjunction with this man and he knew this was
what he should say, given that he had made a mistaken comment and gotten
himself something he really shouldn't want.
"Provocation depends on the company, as I am not unknown to you and there is no
threat that I would never take anything the wrong way there is no need for
worry."
This serious and logical reaction to his largely overacted fear challenged the
young man and forced him to continue his protest.
"It could unleash levels of thought that are not strictly needed..." Rimbaud
continued, then as he cooly and calmly watched Verlaine back away from his
excited perch at the table's edge with a mourning, he found another will inside
him, different words, as with a sigh he said.
"I apologise. I always hate my mother's voice emerging from my lungs. No matter
how far I get away it is always as though I am her puppet or something equally
silly. Here in Paris I should reverse the years of poor behaviour, by the power
of the absinthe I should be honest."
Verlaine just smiled in agreement and his face became roguely handsome to the
drunken young boy. Handsome and scholarly, as though he were a teacher or the
father of a friend regarding him with pride.
"What would your honesty speak if you gave it a tongue?" he prompted.
"It would say yes. My spirit says yes, I want you to kiss me anywhere you would
like to kiss me." Arthur felt an ecstasy in the truth that only the innocent
and repressed really felt.
"It would be ungentlemanly of me to feel provoked now I assume?"
Rimbaud laughed at this comment and Verlaine continued to speak.
"I'm sure it would, but as you are a treasure, your very presence provokes and
moves me deeply. I should not be able to help that as long as I draw breath and
have eyes and ears on my head. Although I should not act upon it unless you
wish me too."
Rimbaud fidgeted and scratched his head and refused to respond for fear that he
had no more words or smiles or things to conceal the truth.
"Two more Absinthes!"
Verlaine said, taking charge of their passage.
Derangement and alien nature all lay beneath the younger boy's grip at a level
of contemplation that he had grown used to ignoring. His instincts were acting
up and suddenly to lay together with this man beckoned immense and not in a way
that was stupid or naive. For the first time it comprised a smart move, one
encouraged by drunken energy and courage but one which was desired passionately
nonetheless, although not for reasons that the young man could strictly fathom.
At the end of that round, feeling as though the substance had done just enough
mangling of his inhibitions to be abandoned he said very suddenly.
"Paul, Paul" This he did very quietly, looking down at his feet at first, then
to his tie which his hands played with and spun apart.
The alcohol steadied him then so that he could finally stare ahead with the
scarcest contemplation or care for failure and demand.
"We are leaving this fucking place, now!"
The black night hit them in a frigid swathe that made Arthur shiver helplessly.
He felt sure he was not afraid but his every sensation was confused by the
drunkenness because when the goose pimples on his flesh were smoothed by
drawing his threadbare clothes closer to himself he still shuddered just as
hard. Air pulled into the cavities of his nose cold and Verlaine insisted upon
taking this moment to close in and clap his hand around his shoulder pulling
his warm wet being into competition with his renewed shivers.
"I've rented you a room it is best for us both to sleep there tonight."
"You should go home to your wife." Arthur said, his voice rising high,
drunkenly buoyant, wanting to test how badly his friend wanted what he did,
dimly aware that should he have made a mistake about it, it could get him sent
back to Roche.
"To be honest I don't think I should ever go back there. Mathilde see, she
doesn't, well, she doesn't allow me into her rooms any longer until the baby
comes, she won't miss me. I shouldn't miss her anymore either, for I have you
now.... It's just that.... you are the most beautiful writer I've ever known,
your language, it's just so unutterably compelling to me."
He ranted all this in a drunken slur as they walked and Arthur pretended not to
listen to him when really he was capturing each section of spill, his ignorance
gave Paul great ability to vent.
"Your ideas have simply consumed me for the weeks since you wrote and now you
are here and the physical reality of you captivates and holds me ever more. You
really are beautiful, bewitching, with your eyes of azure and your mouth just
so dainty and pretty and alike to Mathilde's..."
Unable to take this entirely silently Arthur pushed a suppressed laugh in two
short pants through his nose, humouring his drunken companion. Then, feeling
unable to keep it at that as it crystallised like caught smoke in the stretches
of his drunken brain that he held the power between them, he began to laugh.
Hard and high in volume, hysterically and in Verlaine's face, grabbing his
mentor's arm hard as face round and dumb smiled back indulgently bemused.
Arthur couldn't take the hilarity, the firm feeling of pleasure that he got
from his dominance, so he fell and sat on the cobbled ground outside the public
house. The dirty, earthy smell of shit that he had been protected from by
height clouded over his every intake of breath and the depravity and happiness
inside him mixed headily.
He would never have to go home again.
Verlaine would never allow it.
Verlaine stood by his side now and he too laughed copiously at his
unintentional show. Rimbaud held his leg and wound his eyes up to his friend's
face and as he moved his head was shot through by dissolving slats of dizzy
pain that he could almost visualise with his eyes open.
Pushing his chest into his friend, his heart rebounding off Verlaine's calf, he
said.
"Fuck Paul, help me up would you."
Verlaine lowered a hand to him daintily and took his as softly as he might have
taken a young girls. Rimbaud grabbed at him roughly and nearly pulled him from
his unsteady balance with his vigor at righting himself.
"Are you ok?" Verlaine asked with a tender amount of concern but all his young
companion could do was laugh at him, as the connection between them tugged in a
invasive, feintly disturbing way on his insides, starting on his chest and
working down into his stomach. He really couldn't talk
"Take me back to our fucking room Paul, just take me back!" he said between
gasps of laughs then he said with a sudden catch in his voice "I never want to
go home Paul, never send me home ok, I can't" his voice merged into a spiteful
refusal, a threat.
Hung by his eyes, neglecting all destiny had planned for him, Verlaine fell
into the boy's body and walked on holding him close to him without uttering a
word.
Rimbaud knew from there that he was in love.
***
The sound of bustle present during the day had died down to one distant cart
horse neighing in the distance, the only sound that marred an eerie silence
besides the rustle of their clothes on their bodies.
They had drifted apart, following one another casually as if they had no
interest in one another anymore, as if they were sobering up and falling out of
a spell. Until in the streets, Rimbaud began to unbutton his shirt. Absent
minded at first, then with a compulsive fervor to undress himself so that no
confusion was made of his continuing sexual intentions to the other man. A pure
and acute arousal had spiraled higher in his body to where it was now in charge
of him, making his head a floaty mess full of nothing but the desire to shed
his coverings and get down to whatever it would be.
At first Verlaine took his behaviour for amusing exuberance and closed the
clasps of his shirt to again with his flat warm hand against the young boy's
skin with laughter. Then he felt for himself and observed that his touches just
made the blue eyed creature more lustfully wild and eager to take off his
clothes. Under the threat that he would cause the boy to shed all his clothes
in the streets, a scared Verlaine backed away from the laughing teenager.
They settled again for travelling the coal black cobbles as far apart as
Verlaine could manage without Rimbaud becoming perturbed by their separation
and leaping on him bodily.
The young man grew steadily menacing with his desire, wrapping the fabric of
his bow tight and hard around his fist as though he was throttling something,
seeming scarcely able to work his gangly teenaged limbs in the same direction
as the man he followed, for his preoccupation with expending the erotic energy
that filled him.
Rimbaud seemed to calm when they reached the place, having to focus on climbing
the stairs into the small lodging, he asked Paul idle questions about the place
but still instantly that he was inside the room and facing a closed door he
pulled his shirt off his arms. Then without even looking around he let the
sheet of fabric slip down his back.
Verlaine stalked to the boy and pressed a laugh, scalding hot with his lips
into a gap between his prominent spinal ridges.
Rimbaud whipped round to the other man at once, his face formed into a
fiercesome, starched blanket of disgust, mouth contorted meanly to the other
man's softening eyes of lust, his eyes narrowed and darkened, poured scorn on
him for such a look of weakness and transparency.
He watched with pleasure as the older man withdrew in terror, just as his
sisters had always done when he turned on them for no reason. To watch someone
being stupid or confused was always one of his greatest delights. No matter how
many times he had frightened his sisters, no matter that they expected him to
turn on them, even now they would run away from him just as Verlaine did. It
was an act he was constantly adapting and renewing.
Verlaine got to the door and was fumbling with the key to exit, when Rimbaud
grabbed his clothes with a fighter's grip. He pulled the other, slightly taller
man to him with a power that belied his slight build and shorter stature. Then
with hands still tangled in the other's clothes he kissed at Verlaine's cheeks
which were covered with prickles of hidden hair with a sensual abandonment for
a while. Then his mouth open pushed itself wetly over the older man's cheek to
his ear which he bit suddenly but briefly. Arthur enjoyed that sudden upright
jerk of response which waved from Verlaine through his own body at the very
second he predicted it would and that enjoyment sent itself down in a nosedive
to thicken his prick even harder beneath his trousers.
He stretched his body long and full against the other man to overwhelm any
desire he might have had to escape with the promise of what was to come but was
overall unsure where to touch the other man and sure that he should let the
other man take the lead and yet Paul would not take it.
"Paul fuck me". he ordered, just once without the slightest smirk. The other
man's hands became more managing and fumbled down beneath the thin fabric of
his trousers. Verlaine felt his sex and it sent such a feeling of heaven
through his body that he hoped he would never take his hand from it again.
Verlaine slipped his grip over it's tip again and again and as his speed
increased the touches came accompanied by the warmth of friction. Realising
this might be a problem in time, Verlaine took the hand away to spit into his
palm then reaffixed his hand to Rimbaud's member and rubbed it until it stood
up between them.
The boy threw back his clear white throat in ecstasy, exposing himself in some
vulnerability that seemed more considerable than before, Paul kissed his neck
now and Rimbaud muttered in a gasp.
"I can't stand." and pulled him by his clothes over to the bed.
Rimbaud took the moment to pull his trousers down and at an instant his
companion was on his knees before him, edging his slender fingers up the
poreless alabaster thigh, his gold wedding band gleaming with a single point of
shine. With his other hand he gripped the boy's prick and lay it on his tongue.
What Paul did was disgusting, or should have been and because of that it was
the purest evidence of divinity that the boy had ever observed. It existed, God
did and he knew because he reveled in everything that was contrary to it. His
hands sank deep into his love's hair as he, apparently more knowledgeable about
the desires of Arthur's body than the boy was, set about licking him into
ecstasy. Nature's hand rocked the young boy's hips up in response and he began
throwing his erection into the man's open mouth and throat.
The pleasure was thick and he panted to keep from crying out beneath it's
onslaught. It rained harder and harder upon him until it snapped Then
sprinting, spurting aftershocks seized his hips that made his back arch
violently and automatically.
His substance was nearly clear as it splashed accidentally on the older man's
cheek and the feeling of accomplishment in viewing it's splatter was as
corrupting as he could have hoped. Poetry lyrical and pure traced itself
through his quiet head as he listened to his own panting come down and felt the
enormous tenderness in his dick as it hung rigid, still settling down.
There was no restriction left to tame him, no God with it's claws into him,
only Paul, lovely, dear Paul with one hand dug into his hip, wielding his spit
slick cock in his hand, grin wide in his face like a satyr. He paused briefly
his mouth in that horrible o, his breath hot all bearing down on him. Then with
the younger boy's accommodation Paul rubbed his own slippery phallus into the
boy's soft thighs.
Spurts of come like pearls of milk spilt on Arthur's thigh to follow a throaty
"Fuck!" and the boy swiped his fingers through it's desecration and swirled in
into himself until it was mixed with his flesh like piss in the snow.
"You can't send me away now you have marked me." Verlaine's eyes closed a
little and he didn't respond not feeling the tiniest trace of the need to
disagree. With a seizing flash of insecurity the boy still alert asked him in a
flash of anger and suspicion.
"What, you think my speech juvenile?"
Paul's eyes flipped open at the alarm in his lover's voice, he took his hand
and as he did it were as through some transference occurred in his clam body
all the others instincts and anxiety rose and pounded strong on him and he
rushed to produce reassurance.
"Never should I ever send you away, how could I? Why should you think I might?
Where would I go if I did? I shouldn't imagine your mother would be very
pleased to see me. Where should you get your inspiration for your work if not
for absinthe and Paris and love." as he did this he took his friend's hand that
he had clutched and kissed it as though he were kissing a sovereign or the
ornaments upon a holy person.
The boy wanted to clap his friend on the back but could not.
How could Paul know that he needed this newness to write, how could he know of
the love that fixed itself to every cycle of thought and air pulled in to
inflate his lungs, those organs that no longer worked for blocks of script but
which now had some sense of purpose.
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