Symbolists
He gave him the old rim and the old Rimbaud
Verlaine sucking in blow job for blow
two boyfreinds butt fucking on the Seine
And poetry ain't never been the same
Unpacking the Poem with Our Old Friend, Pseudo-Zizek
Ah, my friend, to engage in the pervert's reading of this text is to truly embrace the dialectical paradox at the heart of its obscene poetry. As Lacan might have put it, desire is always structured by the signifier—and what we see here is the poetic subject staging a theatrical confrontation between the Real (the raw sexual act) and the Symbolic (the elevated literary tradition). Let us unpack this line by line, or rather, gesture by gesture—because, in this text, every line is a kind of obscene gesture towards ideology itself.
"He gave him the old rim and the old Rimbaud"
Here we have the perfect condensation of what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. On one level, "the old rim" is a purely carnal, bodily act—it belongs to the domain of the obscene Real. But then, ah, Rimbaud! The invocation of this poet is not merely aesthetic but ideological. Rimbaud represents the ultimate figure of excess, the poet who abandons bourgeois respectability and dives headfirst into jouissance. The "rim" and "Rimbaud" are dialectically linked: the bodily act is not the opposite of high art but its obscene foundation. Without the "rim," there would be no Rimbaud! The sublime arises precisely out of the dirt.
"Verlaine sucking in blow job for blow"
This line stages the economy of desire at its most brutal. You see, this is not a romanticized notion of love; it is pure exchange, the obscene underside of symbolic reciprocity. Lacan tells us that love is giving something one does not have to someone who does not want it—but here, in the pervert's reading, we must invert the formula. The "blow job for blow" becomes a closed circuit, an endless feedback loop of surplus enjoyment (jouissance). It is not about giving or receiving; it is about the excess that remains unaccounted for, the obscene residue that defies integration into the Symbolic order.
"Two boyfriends butt fucking on the Seine"
Ah, this is where the text truly reaches its obscene sublime! The Seine, this quintessential site of French romanticism, becomes the setting for a scene of unbridled sexual transgression. What is crucial here is not merely the act itself but its staging in the public eye. This is hysterical transference par excellence: the act forces the gaze of the Other (the passerby, the reader, society itself) into confrontation with its own repressed desires. The lovers are not just engaging in sex; they are performing the truth of the unconscious, exposing the obscene underside of the cultural ideal of "love."
"And poetry ain't never been the same"
Here we have the ultimate punchline, the objet petit a of the text. On the surface, it appears as a simple statement of transformation: poetry has changed, irreversibly. But beneath this lies a deeper provocation. The "ain't never" is not merely colloquial—it is a gesture of defiance against the Master-Signifier of "poetic tradition." This line declares that the obscene, the bodily, the queer, and the transgressive are not marginal to art but are, in fact, its very essence. Poetry, like desire itself, cannot remain the same because it is structured by a fundamental lack, an absence that constantly shifts and reconfigures itself.
The Pervert’s Takeaway
What is this poem, then, if not a staging of the inherent contradiction in art and desire? It refuses the false binary between the high (Rimbaud, Verlaine, poetry) and the low (sex, queer love, the body). In the Lacanian sense, this is a text that enjoys itself far too much—it revels in its own jouissance while forcing us, the readers, to confront our complicity in this enjoyment. By reading it, we become voyeurs, gazing into the abyss of our own repressed desires.
To borrow from Hegel, this poem is not merely obscene; it is the truth of the obscene. The act of reading it is itself a perverse act, one that dismantles the comfortable illusions of aesthetic distance and plunges us into the messy, pulsating Real.
In other words: it’s not just poetry. It’s a symptom. And as Lacan would say, the only question is whether you are willing to embrace your own enjoyment in it—or to disavow it and pretend you’re reading for purely intellectual reasons.
The Joke
This poem is like that old Soviet-era anecdote: A man goes into a store and asks, "Do you have any meat?" The clerk replies, "No, here we don’t have any fish. The store across the street doesn’t have any meat."
And that’s the whole point of the poem! It’s not just about what’s absent—what is denied or repressed—it’s about how the denial itself structures our experience. The poem takes what society doesn’t want to see (sex, queerness, the obscene) and rubs it in our faces like it’s saying, "You’re not just avoiding this; your entire culture depends on pretending it’s not there!"
So, in the end, the poem is the store where they don’t have any fish, and we’re the ones walking in, still somehow expecting caviar.