Dee Rimbaud is a Poet, author, artist, illustrator, graphic designer, spiritual healer, house-husband, dad and jack of many trades. One of Scotland’s major iconoclasts. His poetry, short stories and artwork have been published extensively on the internet and in hundreds of magazines and anthologies throughout the USA, Canada, Australia, UK and Europe. His first poetry collection, “The Bad Seed” was published by Stride (1998). His second collection, “Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels” will be published by Bluechrome in March 2004 (and can be ordered online now at their web-site. His novel, ‘Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God’ will be published by Bluechrome in September 2004. You can read his poetry, prose, short stories and novel - and view a massive collection of his artwork - at his web-site, here. You can also buy limited edition prints of his art here

RELATED LINKS

Read Dee's poem, 'A New Clean American Dream' here

Dee's official website, including a 300 pieces of his artwork and 100 pieces of his writing, plus details of the AA Independent Press Guide here

Purchase limited edition copies of issue 3 of Acid Angel, the literary magazine Dee used to edit, here

Read a selection of poems by Dee on the Retort Magazine site here

A selection of poetry and artwork by Dee on the Poetic Inhalation site here

Dee's CV on the Artists Without Frontiers website here

A selection of artworks by Dee on the Mindcog website here

Dee's poem, 'An Epitaph (For Yin) on the Sunny Outside site here

A selection of poetry by Dee on the Butwood website here

DEE'S INFLUENCES

WORDS AND
PICTURES
by Dee Rimbaud

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'MOTHER OF GOD'
by Dee Rimbaud

Mary knew neither the pleasure nor the pain of sex,
But she understood the terror of being visited by angels
And the more straightforward agonies of childbirth.
In this way, she is, at the same time,
Elevated above us, and yet, still one of us.
At least, that is what I’ve been led to believe.

This Mary, before me and above me,
With her inscrutable plaster face
Not exactly smiling down on me
Could only have been carved by a man:
A man with his dreams of sacrifice
And the unemotional purity of duty;
A monk or a priest, perhaps,
But certainly not a man who understood women.

I want to understand her, this mother of God,
For all our children are holy in some way, aren’t they?
I want to know what she felt:
Not the mythical immaculate virgin,
But the real flesh and guts woman,
With her milk stained tunics
And work worn hands.

I want to know the Mary who copulated,
Not with angels, but with her man.
Did she lie back like the sacrificial lamb,
A vessel, bravely thinking of Jerusalem?
Or was she something more?
This mother of the Christ-child
And all his sisters and brothers?
For all her periods and pregnancies,
Did she get to understand the rhythm of the Earth?
Did she ever ride on top, a Goddess,
Enraptured with her own sweet self?

There are no marks, no scars on her plaster skin,
No clues, but if this Mary could speak,
She would say naught of her self
But speak only of other women’s sorrows,
For she has seen
A passing procession of womanhood
Of all ages, of all races, before her
And she has heard every story
That ever a woman could have told.

I behold her stony, silent eyes.
They look down upon me, upon my pram
With its cargo of sleepy flesh:
My baby, with her colic and pain;
My off-spring, my offering
With her sad-eyed, unknowing yearning For a father who is as distant
As a Holy Ghost.

I offer up my pain, my prayers, my doubts
As a myriad have done before me,
Hoping that the Mary who bled milk and tears,
The Mary who worked the home and the fields,
Will somehow be able to hear me.

© Dee Rimbaud

'ATOM DEAD LATEX'
by Dee Rimbuad

The angels play chemical kettle drums for these dead men. Smiling sad as colonels handing out medals. Medals for dead men. This new age. New rage. Its war. And all this will be destroyed. There is no garden of liberation.

A tin machine with angry, jubilant, glorious others underneath. Waves in the deep. A second roll of imagining. The avant-garde chosen few. The burnt out survivors. Swell of drum roll leading to apocalypse. Waiting and wailing out. Makes me dream so soft of before.

I run away, not an army, not a green beret: smell of piss and fear and ammonia. Rank discord. Smell of apocalypse. To begin the end. Here, a pawn in the underground.

Soft bellies, ragged in the side and bright as soft teats/ one march across the chess board and blown to small bits. The wind pulls me forward.

Forward by his light. This God of infernal Zion. Benign, cartwheeling towards the shelled town, down into a white free sun. High as sky high love light. White before this body. Feel nothing. These pink tit bits. This blood. Mud. I hear angels, sirens singing. Soft, gentle, touching me with wounds: not dying but drifting like brides dancing through corn. I drift, a cross, Christ light, Christ like over charnel ground. The lunacy, a rusted metal dream upon me.

Such pain in these dreams. Blue, blue as only bodies can be. Ill with long death. Rusted metal/ brief as only I can be.

Hopeless this dreaming of something white. Remembering only, how to breathe.

Breathe, nearly naked small boy at her breast, free like wind, I eat up the Earth. It is swimming.

Sustenance in my belly. A mouse, all now and now nothing. Red meat disgusts. I remember other times. Hell is cordite smell. I could not stay and die like all the others.

They smell of if-joys, talk of cricket and other things. I am resolved to not turn black. Life is not a piece of cake.

I want out

Sunk into mud ocean floored/ sweaty grimy being/ toxic with claustrophobic trench foot/ first into the bunker’s a dead man and Christ is next appearing at cinema near you.

I am me again/ churning in the afterdrift of a few burnt over/ bombers grinding sky to gunmetal dawn... survivors celebrating to strewn limbed revulsion/ here, a foray at living, a second star in the east/ I hear my mouth leading me to death... a red maid who walks the red squares of the chess board.

Stop

Nothing else. Too ragged to fight, but they strike. One orange red flower of death like a random coming of Christ light. Feeling the swell, blinking in the shrapnel of the new race. Remembering death sunk away, and saying thank you for the bleached yellow corn, way across the hills, but still not freedom running.

A sense of tranquillity descending now as fear blacks out to new place. Cannot feel back to a time before. Now, but a sublime peace, a peace that cannot sustain without dreams of glowing brides, Jesus, Mary (and I am out the wheat fields with transposed hands and a river of melting soaking in salt water sink and gone gone gone)

Voices.... them calling me back to dead men and gun shot orchestras serenading. A vision charging me, red and brown as breath choked from mustard gas... running, running, running back to the small shelled town where we dreamt of dying to the sound of apocalyptic tango, strung out and waiting for orders to advance

I am running back

No part of me moved to heroics. No stoic. A dream of flying free, lying in blood earth under cover of charred, scorched fronds of once-was-corn. See her coming to me, blond hair in pleats. A corn dolly. A hallucination. The devil dancing on a fiery sea of stones. Let my hometown fry in hell. I want her. Her pink tits milking my thirsty mouth.

But I am not stupid... I hear her bagpipe call, her disarray. The mocking cabaret of dead men and troop train smell.

I am nothing. A man swat fly of fear. A part of those who would strike out at a random bunch, a random race... be they ugly or Christ-like and gentle.

I am running towards hills. An early small boy naked. Feel nothing now but my lungs... remembering how to breathe.

Running now, a scream tore her... to free her breast like the wind, that I may eat up the Earth.

Her teats like matchwood, leading my mouth to death. Stones on the red squares of this board.

Here lies an unknown soldier. Too anonymous when orders came in.

There is no garden of England. No return to the soft rebate of hills, the rose twines of church gates and Sunday roast cricket. I will never eat from

these bodies burnt, twisted, torn

in soft brown moist gravy,

an idyll of rural angels and chess boards, red & white gingham of schoolgirl innocence. This is the wretchedness of all this bloody war. There can never be a return. These medals are for killers. This government is a whore. There is nothing in the burnt out aftermath. Nothing to breathe. This torn pink tit of flesh in my side. No pain anymore. Just angels and charred sustenance. I am Christ and all red meat disgusts.

© Dee Rimbaud
Reproduced with permission

'FRANKFURT AIRPORT'
by Dee Rimbaud

Stopped over in this sterile air-con place
We sit, squeezed into soft plastic seats,
Gazing out the plate glass at idle jets
Nestled in quiet neon darkness
As the automatic walkway click clacks gently,
Marking out the slow passage of time:
A dim metallic heartbeat
Reducing all thought and all memory
To the loose penumbra of unreality.

Airport jokes fade into dumb nothingness
As time stretches out to meet infinity
Somewhere high above the blank map of Germany;
And another airline rep smooth talks us
Into accepting the extended waiting patiently.
Just a technical hitch, he says,
Smiling his vapid airline smile,
Reducing all feeling, all sensation
To numb inevitability.

I smoke one more cigarette and you sleep,
Your tousled head on my lap, your doll hand
Draped languidly in mine.
Almost not here, away in a hallucinating space,
A flickering smile plays upon your face:
You are Kali Ma, dancing the Earth to dust
And I am The Perfumed Saint,
Exuding insufferable benign sweetness.

I press my ear to your red, full lips,
Listen to the slow rhythm of your breathing,
The hieroglyphs of your dreams,
The dark ocean of your being;
And through the torpid mist
Of this transitory soulless place
I sense the quintessential spirit,
The ineffable mystery that is you.


© Dee Rimbaud
Reproduced with permission

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DEE'S UK PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE:

Acumen, Aireings, Ambit, Black Mountain Review, Cutting Teeth, Dreamcatcher, The Erotic Review, Global Tapestry, Headpress, The Interpreter’s House, Kindred Spirits, Liar Republic, Magma, New Writing Scotland, Nomad, Northwords, Other Poetry, Orbis, Oxford Quarterly Review, Reater, Scotland On Sunday, Spume, Tandem, Tears In The Fence, Understanding, Urthona.

DEE'S USA/ CANADA PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE:

The American Muse, The Antigonish Review, Bathtub Gin, Broken Pencil, Brutarian, Cimarron Review, Descant, Fine Madness, Flyaway, Gargoyle, Kiss Machine, Long Shot, Lungfull!, Main Street Rag, North American Review, Pearl, Rattapallax, Slipstream, Toronto Review, Trouvére Literary Review, Whiskey Island.

DEE'S ARTWORK HAS GRACED THE COVERS OF BOOKS BY:

Rupert Loydell, Carolyn Finlay, Norman Jope, A C Evans, Radames Ortiz, Paul Ward, Wade Vonasek, Marcy Jarvis and Kay Green.

DEE'S TOP 5 SCOTTISH NOVELS

1. "Lanark" by Alasdair Gray
2. "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks (best ever debut novel, pity he couldn't follow it up)
3. "Trainspotting" by Irvine Welsh (2nd best ever debut novel and, sadly, ditto)
4. "Morvern Callar" by Alan Warner
5. "The Trick is To Keep Breathing" by Janice Galloway


DEE'S TOP 5 RECREATIONAL DRUGS

1. ecstasy
2. acid
3. magic mushrooms
4. nutmeg (you better believe it)
5. valium


DEE'S TOP 10 PLACES IN THE WORLD AS HE KNOWS IT

1. The ruins of Hampi (India)
2. The Cliffs Of Moher (Ireland)
3. Swayambunath Stupa (Nepal)
4. Angkor Wat (Cambodia)
5. The Isle of Iona (Scotland)
6. Cuenca (Spain)
7. Florence (Italy)
8. Arambol Beach (India)
9. Varanassi (India)
10. North West coast (Scotland)

© Dee Rimbaud
Reproduced with permission

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