A Season in Hell

On an upper floor of the library at Sam Houston State University, sprawled out on a faux-leather couch, metal bars digging into my spine. Through the narrow windows, the sky is a putrescent purple, the fading corpse of a lazy Saturday. To the subtle buzz of incandescent lights, I page through William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Only the occasional graduate student, a dreary-eyed ghost haunting the stacks, disturbs my solitude. The night ahead promises debauchery. Soon I’ll be straining to hear drink orders over shitty jukebox selections, drinking and smoking too much, and inevitably ending up in someone else’s bed. A fellow student if the night goes well, but a local in a pinch. Fast-forward a bit, and I’m shipping off to MCRD San Diego and then to School of Infantry–West, where I learn to follow orders without question and kill without remorse. I stop reading poetry. Until today. I’m rediscovering the beauty of verse in Arthur Rimbaud. A man after my own heart—a…