Nothing But a Star

by Jeremy Reed

  to put it to the test

  I’d never intended

  to travel but pretended

  I’d do it and instead

  read books on the docks

  right there at the Bodega

  not at Charing Cross station

  or smoking black opium

  at foggy Limehouse Basin

  I didn’t do it, didn’t go

  with the flow but instead

  found myself at the Bodega

  travelling inside my head

  At the Bodega I sank

  Cockburn’s fine port and guess

  black pudding Palmer’s biscuits

  under English duress

  and drank porter and bitter

  like a docker and read

  of London’s foggy harbours

  with their green lights and red

  I didn’t do it, didn’t go

  with the flow but instead

  found myself at the Bodega

  travelling inside my head

  I knew that I’d forfeit

  my visit and stay here

  no incentive to do it

  or drink beer in a bar

  or encounter damp weather

  smoggy fog, a brown tide

  dumping offal downriver

  and drowned suicides

  I didn’t do it, didn’t go

  with the flow but instead

  found myself at the Bodega

  travelling inside my head

  I went back to the station

  my sensory notation

  mapping out London

  like I’d done it and gone,

  been there and come back

  disillusioned as always,

  returned with my trunks

  to my solitary days

  I didn’t do it, didn’t go

  with the flow but instead

  found myself at the Bodega

  travelling inside my head

  Black Halo

  As an exacting bibliophile who collects rare first editions of books he loves, delighting in fine bindings, hand-made papers and silk endpapers, Des Esseintes’ immersion in the cult of decadent literature is characterised by an extreme love of Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal having been the subject of a trial for obscenity on its publication in 1850. In this song he equates Baudelaire’s person with a black halo, and celebrates books as being far more reliable companions than friends.

  Black Halo

  Hand-made paper fine bindings

  in buckram and morocco

  gothic fonts and rococo

  spirals like a pagoda

  I like leather and silk

  finished boards, Indian ink

  and Japanese endpapers

  in purple and pink

  It’s Baudelaire I love

  my saint and my hero

  his infectious decadence

  worn like a black halo

  my saint and my hero

  I caress books like a lover

  sniff rag-paper and glue,

  stroke vellum like satin

  (if only you knew)

  books are my true friends

  in the end I prefer

  their contents to people

  except one black sailor

  It’s Baudelaire I love

  my saint and my hero

  his infectious decadence

  worn like a black halo

  my saint and my hero

  I read Villon, de Sade

  and most of all Poe

  the spinal chill of his stories

  acts like vertigo

  I’m sucked into his vortex

  by lamplight and stay

  fixated by horror

  disease and decay

  It’s Baudelaire I love

  my saint and my hero

  his infectious decadence

  worn like a black halo

  my saint and my hero

  It’s a lonely pursuit

  when you’re lost in the past

  that young man I picked up

  he’s just one of the cast

  that you meet with to lose

  and re-find in a book

  it’s the smell of the paper

  recalls his dark look

  It’s Baudelaire I love

  my saint and my hero

  his infectious decadence

  worn like a dark halo

  my saint and my hero

  When I look at my life

  I make no amends

  the lovers I lost

  never became friends

  but my books remain constant

  and I’ll read them again

  with the night coming on

  to the slow sound of rain

  Disease and the Devil

  Disease and the devil co-exist in des Esseintes’ mind as partners in crime as he remembers his flagrantly dissolute past. His disgust with the pedestrian and the commonplace, and his desire to live through pure sensation, flavours a song describing his increasing removal from ordinary life as he seeks refuge from humanity. The song also expresses his belief in the efficacy of most forms of deviancy as means of subverting a corrupt system.

  Disease and the Devil

  It’s white wine gives me shine

  the colour of onion skins

  with a sugary bouquet

  that pops taste-buds like pins

  old Malaga and port

  seem to flavour the liquor

  and the taste of a brothel

  I knew by the harbour

  Disease and the devil

  co-habit in my brain

  like a scarlet rumba

  disease and the devil

  are at it again

  Cities change like our lives

  what survives is the slow

  pain of dissolution

  like a peacock rainbow

  all the pills won’t reverse

  this madness I feel,

  or reverse paranoia;

  my symptoms are real

  Disease and the devil

  co-habit in my brain

  like a scarlet rumba

  disease and the devil

  are at it again

  I’m exotic neurotic

  disgusted by the common

  the pedestrian mainstream

  who live at the bottom,

  corrupt politicians

  financiers bankers

  hedge-funders czars

  and militant wankers

  Disease and the devil

  co-habit my brain

  like a scarlet rumba

  disease and the devil

  are at it again

  All I want’s pure sensation

  like sitting in a rose

  or eating a human

  with a perfumer’s nose

  I’ve the money for glitz

  but the Ritz doesn’t appeal

  and I’d rather pay rent boys

  to go out and steal

  Disease and the devil

  co-habit my brain

  like a scarlet rumba

  disease and the devil

  are at it again

  There’s no cure for living

  my genes are all wrong

  syphilitic erosion

  leaks into my song

  but I’m alive for optimal

  reward and disdain

  like a cocktail that converts

  pleasure into pain

  Saint in Black Velvet

  Brought to a crisis by a decline in his nervous health that also affects him physically, Des Esseintes acknowledges that his withdrawal from life and human company hasn’t resulted in the sort of visionary self-realisation that he’d hoped to achieve at Fontenay. Exhausted by his mystic quest, ill and long alienated from the life he knew, he decides, on medical advice, to return to Paris. His most abiding memory is of the capricious relationship he shared with the schoolboy—a brief interlude of happiness within the continued sense of disillusionmen
t that now accompanies him on his return to Paris.

  Saint in Black Velvet

  There’s no cure for my pain

  my insane teens, my depravity

  my name coated in shame

  and dandified vanity

  I can’t do it alone

  in my pseudo-ship’s cabin

  undo what I’ve done

  like a jewel wrapped in satin

  I’m a saint in black velvet

  going back to my past

  carrying my own coffin

  towards Paris at last

  going back to my past

  All my fine-tuned refinement

  and the books that I’ve read

  and weirdo pulling punches

  in my red satin bed

  all those contemplative hours

  making night into day

  didn’t realise a vision

  or show me the way

  If I tampered with time

  like laundering money

  plunged a spoon of majoun

  into Manuka honey

  I savoured the essence

  of decadence like smoke

  as a foggy illusion

  that spiralled and broke

  I’m a saint in black velvet

  going back to my past

  carrying my own coffin

  towards Paris at last

  going back to my past

  There’s nothing repeatable

  or unbeatable to do

  I struck out in purple

  and came back in blue

  and my servants have seen

  my exhaustive obsessions

  and the things I collected

  my bookish possessions

  What I’ve lost is what I’ve found

  it’s that boy I remember

  acute hurt in his look

  that gold day in September

  and his black hair turned raffish

  I remember his sadness

  now I go back to Paris

  to encounter new madness

  I’m a saint in black velvet

  going back to my past

  carrying my own coffin

  towards Paris at last

  going back to my past

  Me and My Coffin

  The final song in the cycle, a blues, finds Des Esseintes reflecting on his acute loneliness and isolation in the city and anticipating his death right down to a detailed concern with the state of his coffin. His morbid obsession with his looks extends to worrying about his makeup after death. The colours repeated, orange, red, purple, green and blue, in the refrain, provide an upbeat foil to the prospect of encroaching death.

  Me and My Coffin

  It seems that they’re renovating the kitchen

  I’ll only be carried back in

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep blue colour that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems that they’re renovating my life

  I don’t want to be scraped by a builder’s knife

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep blue colour that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems that the city’s now another place

  like the network of lines scoring my face

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep blue colour that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems that the friends I had are all dead

  and now live as zombies inside my head

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep blue colour that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems that I’m left alone in this bar

  that’s really the back of a funeral car

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep shade of blue that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems I made life into travesty

  as a cabaret bon vivant dandy

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep shade of blue that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems that my makeup’s smudged by the rain

  I won’t get the chance to do it again

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep shade of blue that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  It seems like they’re renovating the kitchen

  I’ll only be carried back in

  in my coffin

  it’s orange and red and purple and green

  and a deep shade of blue that’s in between

  me and my coffin

  About the Author

  Jeremy Reed is a Jersey-born poet and novelist, dubbed by The Independent, “British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie”, and by Pete Doherty, “a legend”. Author of over fifty volumes of poetry (including Listening to Marc Almond, Quentin Crisp as Prime Minister and Patron Saint of Eye-Liner), fifteen novels (including Boy Caesar, The Grid and Here Comes the Nice), and numerous volumes of non-fiction, Reed is known for his extraordinary imaginative gifts, his characteristic use of language like experience freshly recorded on the nervous system, and his visionary mining of subject matter outside the range of his contemporaries. His biggest fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Björk, who has called his work, “the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.”

  Also from Chômu Press:

  Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?

  “Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

  By Quentin S. Crisp

  I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

  By Justin Isis

  Here Comes the Nice

  By Jeremy Reed

  Dadaoism (An Anthology)

  Onion Songs

  By Steve Rasnic Tem

  The Galaxy Club

  By Brendan Connell

  Jane

  By P.F. Jeffery

  For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/

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  Table of Contents

  Black Tattoos (The Suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby)

  Around the World

  Superglue

  Diadem Court

  Reported Sightings

  A Day in the Life

  Soho Kids in Retro—(pop song)

  ET Conference

  Harold Robbins

  Peppering Strawberries

  Recorded Music

  Bonus Tracks

  Jumping the Queue

  Pink Roses

  Bank Holiday

  Just a Shot Away

  Geranium and Orange Chocolate

  100 Years On or So

  Workshop

  Holly’s Moves

  Chasing the Dragon

  Come Alive and Burn

  Maddox Street

  Elegy for Paul Lightborn

  Books

  Wounded Kink

  White Boy Blues

  Suck Grease Off Fingers

  Vada the Mystery

  The Casbah Lounge

  Love Song by Jean Genet—(Goldfinger remix)

  Nasty Habits: Mick Taylor’s Rolling Stones

  Johnny Spitfire

  Marta

  Voodoo

  The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series

  China Tea, Roses and Your Sort of Hat

  Eleonara Come Back

  Ruth Ellis Blues

  Listening to the Television Personalities

  Collecting Asa (Benveniste)

  Selling Truman Capote

  ‘Sorr
ow’—original and cover

  Charles Baudelaire, Voyage to Cythera—(sex tourist remix)

  Dorian

  Limehouse Blues—(Dorian)

  Sling City—(Henry Wotton)

  Black Honey

  Excess and Ruin—(Dorian)

  Sibyl Vane’s Blues

  HQ

  Hanging On

  Ham Yard

  White Poppy Blues

  Roses and Guns

  Pills

  Retro Shirts

  Shares

  Addicted

  Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful

  Pulling the Cork

  J&B

  Sweet Thing

  Broken Hearted

  Global Spin

  Donald Fagen’s Top Ten

  What John Ashbery Eats for Lunch

  Mister Handsome

  Just a Shot Away

  Broadwick Street

  Vauxhall Bridge

  Russian Caravan

  Sequins

  Jean Cocteau Lines made into a Pop Song

  Lissiana

  Allium

  Maroon Dahlia

  Sandra

  Urban Cannibals

  Autumn Blues

  Depression Greys

  September Writing in the Rain

  Honey

  What I’m Doing

  Street Reading

  Elephants

  Yauatcha

  R.E.M.

  Yellow Chrysanthemums

  Rock ’n’ Roll Suicides

  What I’m Giving

  Non-Mainstream

  Frank

  Ennui

  Indigo and Orange

  Flowers and Cannibals

  Uranian Blues

  A Delinquent Treat

  Frangipani

  Foggy Harbour Days

  Black Halo

  Disease and the Devil

  Saint in Black Velvet

  Me and My Coffin