I had just returned from the Horn of Africa where I was researching an article on Rimbaud who had been there in the 1880s

It had been a fascinating but ultimately depressing experience

The people that I had met were on the whole friendly but were involved in endless conflicts with the neighbours

My French was good so I did not find it hard to get by although half the population seemed to be stoned and were often to be found during the hot hours just stretched out on their mats doing very little

Rimbaud had been in the first wave of the colonists and the now decrepit buildings built less than a hundred years ago were rotting slowly in the sun

I had stayed at a coffee traders house and shared my retreat with a number of other families.

The house fine its day was decaying and anything of value had been looted during the passing years although to my complete surprise the beautiful bannisters that adorned the sweeping staircase had been left largely alone

Also on the main landing there were three windows of coloured glass

Red orange and amber

These were almost pristine save for the dust that had become ingrained into the sensitive glass

I was told that they still served a purpose

That was to filter the raw afternoon sun which I would imagine was their purpose in the first place

That and decoration

My room was opposite these windows and this is where I first contracted the fever that forced me to leave the country

I was warned that my fever although not serious would leave me in a kind of hallucinatory state for a while where I would imagine myself elsewhere

These dreams would be vivid in nature and could last a matter of seconds or longer

 I would recall an incident or a dream from years past with total clarity

It was a strange and often alarming feeling

When I was in my twenties I fell in with a group of hippies as we toured around Greece

I was popular as I was a poet and had an understanding of the art and I was often asked to explain the works of Baudelaire and other symbolist poets

For some reason we stopped in Salonika and set up a commune of sorts at an old farm which had been owned by the late grandfather of Glass a French/Greek teacher who had tagged along with us

The strange thing was that his grandfather had also owned a few shops in a small town some five miles from the outskirts of the city

I say shops but they were really just buildings with shop fronts and had not traded for years

But amongst these ghost shops was a mausoleum open to the street with the tombs of eight members of a family enclosed within

Only ornate rusted railings protected their final resting places from the street although I could not see that anybody had tried to force entry

We often spent time in the mausoleum smoking grass and drinking lightly

I was frequently asked to read poetry from my copy of Baudelaire’s works that I always carried with me

This request nearly always came from a French boy who was known as Jack who claimed that he was directly related to Germain Nouveau the French poet who had known Rimbaud

I had no reason to disbelieve him as he shared the same facial features and brooding dark looks as Nouveau

Although we had a right to visit the mausoleum we were on occasions asked to leave by the local cops

Maybe it was because of the use of drugs or that they thought that we were disturbing the dead

But we would return and the self same cops that had asked us to leave would pass by without incident

Whilst in the mausoleum I studied the tombs that were dated between 1839 and 1944 and housed members of the same family

The smallest and most recent was that of a Christina Theorakis who died in 1944 at the hands of the German’s

Her tomb seemed a little out of place within the confines of the ancient mausoleum and I was told later by a local priest that she had been shot along with twenty-four other people in revenge for the death of a German officer who had been murdered by partisan’s operating nearby

He further told me that her sister hung herself in her father’s orchard on finding the body of her brother who had also been shot to death during a fire fight with the invaders

For some reason she was buried nearby and went to her grave ignorant of the death of her sister who had been executed on the same day

The story brought tears to my eyes and although I was not writing much poetry at the time I scribbled some lines down which later became Khat Kitten one of my most popular poems

I have been warned not to visit Africa again as now that I have become infected by this strange fever I will only worsen the condition if I return

In one way this saddens me as although hard these African trips fascinated me and disgusted me at the same time

In 1891 a mortally ill Rimbaud left Africa for the last time towards his native France

He had lived and travelled in isolation for many years and only returned when death was near

During my Greek years an American boy called Andrew said to me that we all ultimately return to the womb

Whether that is true or not is an open question as I believe in the case of Rimbaud he was trying to return to Africa and that his final communication was to a steamship company describing his disablement and the requirements for his journey

Although my travel is a little restricted I know that I will recover and will be able to travel again unlike Rimbaud who lies quietly in his grave in Charleville next to his sister Vitalie

The inscription on his grave reads Priez pour lui which I think is quite apt for Rimbaud when you consider his work and his nomadic life