my hair to my shoulder a thin goatee a thin moustache under small 1930s-style round tortoise-shell frames and my grandfather’s tweed flat cap and my U.S. regulation bomber jacket with worn zippers and cracked leather ransomed from the Salvation Army

the cap at 19 like a shadow like a shade of Kerouac on Route 66 which I also know but no one steps twice onto the same road

the tortoise-shell too self-consciously like Comrade Trotsky a minor antithesis perhaps lines my jacket uncovered where a paperback peeks from my pocket what other than the Illuminations of Rimbaud but let us confess our contradiction let us turn to dialectic whether or not Rimbaud ever truly mounted a barricade in the Paris Commune wasn't that Rimbaud French schoolboy in the daguerreotype on the New Directions cover some years before he crossed over to the other side to skim a franc here a franc there from a caravan hauling guns Rimbaud reputed crony of traders marching slaves to market in Harar in East Africa Rimbaud with a billet in Aden not Eden

in the days before the truth found itself in exile in the days before Pravda and Stalin collected farmers for Siberia or before peasants harvested famine before a pick-axe found Coyoacán or an Enola Gay fly-boy a bomber jacket

underlined in my copy of Rimbaud Je est un autre a French schoolboy’s letter and manifesto for a systematic derangement of the five senses

and what of Trotsky with Las Dos Fridas in Coyoacán where Frida Kahlo is left alone to hold her own hand

and what of so-and-so and somebody’s plan to meet on or about May Day at the Cliff House or perhaps on Russian Hill to view the Golden Gate

underlined in my Rimbaud à son état primitif de fils du Soleil license enough to seek to restore that child of the Sun that primitive state