Poetry In Motion

“I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — 
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; 
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, 
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.”

-C.B.

Charles Baudelaire roamed the streets of Paris as a flaneur, a wandering poet in search of what we might now call “soft news.” His spleen was enormous. He floated down les avenues awash in absinthe, in a cloud of opium, being rained on by hydrogen and oxygen. A self described combatant, he fenced with the city to win its rhymes. Cities contain fences. Therefore, he might have sometimes fenced with a fence.

Replace “stroll” with “drive”, “the city” with “I-90”, and “poetry” with “blog” and you’ll see that I am exactly the same as Charles Baudelaire. He fenced for poetry, I for funny jokes. We are as one, except that I haven’t written poems called “A Hideous Jewess Lay With Me” and “To She Who Is Too Gay.”

En guarde, America!