"I went through a whore's Hell over there - and I will now be able to be both sides of the truth in one body, one soul."

- Arthur Rimbaud, "Farewell", A Season In Hell

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by Poet X

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In which the character Poet X, it is discovered, is the one who has, as claimed occasionally throughout "Taken to the Twin Peaks of Harar", written it.

I am not one of the accomplices of Berkowitz and actually did not write the poems and Breslin letters! But, like Bob in "Twin Peaks" (F-B-M as I type this, flood news on tv, the rivers' "peaks"), Poet X is a a moveable spirit. Bring on the floods and false prophets!

Poet X says shit a lot and infested Rimbaud way back when. 

Call me Arthur Rimbaud or Neal (F-B-M) Cassady,¹ William Blake, Edward Lacie.

While he lived in Spokane, I lived with him. I helped him find a house to rent.

"I'll have whatever Dylan Thomas² was having," Baysans used to ask Jon at the bar. Poet X taught him the joke. When Edward Lacie claimed to have killed Poet X is when Poet X claimed Edward Lacie!

Before that I inhabited Charlie Manson for a short while but that guy was too weird.

Though I can't reveal who I currently am "working with," I can say that I'm living close enough to your residence, dear Reader, to have looked over your shoulder as you've read this. I know you know about me.

I'm especially careful not to be noticed as I watch you. The reason I watch is so you don't tip off Ed Lacie (he hates being called "Ed") to my existence. Call me Luke, it's so holy.

Given that I was with Rimbaud when he wrote A Season in Hell, I am a natural to translate it into A Whole Shift at Broiler. The story fits me like a shoe designed by Sylvia Plath.³

It was I, Poet X, who wrote the entire manuscript of A Season In Hell (but, interestingly, not Illuminations): "Once, if memory serves me right, my life aspired to a banquet where every whim was accomodated on an island in a fine wine sea."