No Name #226

One of my old favorite boys introduced me to the poetry of Rimbaud when I was twenty. I still idly flip through Rimbaud collections when I find myself in bookstores, hoping that the news of my fidelity will travel back to that boy along the universal psychic pipeline. Then last night in lecture, my professor idly mentioned that at the end of his life Rimbaud renounced poetry in favor of industry and became a slave-trader. This knowledge will color all my subsequent readings and now I wonder: am I sad because I’ve lost the poet? Or the poetry? Or because I’ve lost the boy?