Gerard de Nerval is, arguably, Richard's finest poem, (it has a feeling of being a composite of Hell's writing as in "with gooey legs falling asleep/your neck stretching" and Nerval's in "with jesus' gold chariot" and strikes me as an authentic, sincere and in Hell's word and image choices, a very sweet elegy) and it was with Richard's writing in mind that I decided to re-read Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia last night. Before Nerval committed suicide in 1855, by hanging himself from an apron string that he claimed to be the garter of the Queen of Sheba, he produced a succinct, yet profound body of writing. If you don't have a copy of Aurelia to hand, i wanted to quote you some of it, just for kicks, so that you might read it in a Richard Hell voice, and pretend to be Billy Mudd, or some such:

"...'What madness,' I told myself, 'to go on platonically loving a woman who no longer loves you. This is the evil result of your reading. You have taken the conceits of poets quite seriously and fashioned yourself a Laura or a Beatrice out of an ordinary person of the present century...You'll forget her directly you start a new affair.'
(after meeting another woman)...I imagined myself so smitten by her that I wrote to her without waiting a moment. I was so happy to feel my heart capable of a new love. As soon as the letter had gone, I wanted to take it back, and in my solitude I dreamed over what seemed to me a profanation of my memories. The next evening lent my new love the glamour of the night before...I had, in one day, I had gone through many stages of those feelings that a man can experience for a woman with sincerity..."
-Gerard de Nerval.

i took this photograph at Gerard de Nerval's grave in Paris a couple of years ago.