Read the poem 'Cities Vagabonds' by Arthur Rimbaud while you stream AMOK, the new album by Atoms For Peace 

Cities Vagabonds

These are cities!

And this is the people for whom these

Alleghenys and Lebanons of dream have been raised!

Castles of wood and crystal move on tracks and invisible winches.

Old craters ringed with mammoth statues and

coppery palms roar melodiously in flames.

Festivals of love reverberate

from the canals suspended behind the castles.

Chimes echo through the gorges like a chase.

Corporations of giant singers assemble,

their vestments and oriflames

brilliant as the mountain-peaks.

On platforms in the midst of gulfs,

Rolands brazen their bravuras.

From abysmal catwalks and the rooftops of inns,

a burning sky hoists flags upon the masts.

The collapse of apotheosis

unites the heights to the depths

where seraphic shecentaurs

wind among the avalanches.

Above the plateaus of the highest reaches,

the sea, troubled by the perpetual birth of Venus

and loaded with choral fleets amid

an uproar of pearls and precious conches,

grows dark at times with mortal thunder.

On the slopes,

harvests of flowers

as big as our weapons

and goblets are bellowing.

Processions of Mabs in red-opaline scale the ravines.

On high, their feet in the waterfalls and briars,

stags give suck to Diana.

Bacchantes of the suburbs weep,

and the moon burns and howls.

Venus enters the caves

of the black-smiths and hermits.

Clusters of belfries repeat the ideas of the people.

Issues from castles of bone an unknown music.

In the boroughs legends

are born and enthusiasm germinate.

A paradise of storms collapses.

Savages dance without stopping the festival of night.

And, for one hour, I descended into the swarm

of a boulevard of Baghdad

where groups of peple were singing

the joy of the new work,

circulating under a heavy wind

without being able to escape those fabulous phantoms

of the mountains to which one must return.

What good arms, what wondrous hour

will restore to me that region

whence come my slumbers

and least movements?

For more poems of Arthur Rimbaud click here