Nostalgie De La Boue

Today give me no elegant literature:
No Eliza Bennet spurning Darcy at the dance,
No plotted intrigue, no fine romance,
No courtly love, no jousting knights, no maids
Distressed and pining in sylvan glades.

Today give me no hearts and flowers:
No wuthering heights, no blethering flights
Of fancy, no sweet sights
Of dresses sweeping over manicured lawns,
No rose metaphors, no rosy-fingered dawns.

Today I woke delirious from dreams.
So give me mad, bad books for a bitter mood:
Dorian Gray, Jude, Sexus, Edwin Drood,
Give me the twisted, bilious and obscene:
Gangantua and Pantagruel, Spleen.

Today I feel that decadence is virtue.
So give me the sins of Rimbaud and Verlaine,
De Sade for pain, Stevenson for cocaine,
Carver and Scott Fitzgerald for a booze-up,
Bukowski if there’s still more drink to use up.

Today just let me crawl along the pavement
Like Baudelaire, nostalgic in the mud,
Misheard, misread, misled, misunderstood.
Though didn’t Oscar Wilde at one time utter
You see the stars from lying in the gutter?