To Antonin Artaud – 4/10/08 --

Truncated, there, in the darkness, head held high

above encroaching Waters you smoke Opium

in your Pain – words

are bullets in your Mind, your

electrical happenings

unguent fires for your muscular Spasm this

witness to The Plague they

laughed at you in

your chimerical Agony you here

on a soundstage quiet

with heraldic Unity – We are

the forbears

of the blind, We

suck from history

what we can – It is in our inherited protestation

we cull

the truth in the chaff we

see you in Purgatory saluting your wives, your

sisters, your Shakespearian daughters

all trapped

you with the bold caca who would

never let part his

Virginal waters amazed and succumbing to

the terror of a child beckoning for the womb

in Feminine mystery

cleansed for your Oration --

you have done with the judgment of God but

what does he think of you? Withdrawing

from your high in Mexico you

find in the Tarahumaras’ death’s-heads

a theatre

of hunting and Survival, the bardo of a body

violently thrown

out and Surging in the dirt a body-double, an

ancestral Yearning

for true mothers and fathers

in this dry Air – ”My penance is

my work,” I

might say – laudanum still Surges

in your veins

you who would find assassins in Suicide the

vague, numberless Wholes

splitting diamonds and wrecking havoc

on our potent Seers – Time

bears down

on our bones like a new Mother

suffering birth pangs; what

is it to you, Antonin, to be born?

Can you forgive Fate, that Strange mother,

inchoate in pressurized Silence all synapses firing

as you dance sparking in clenched Contusion can

you inter a Halo

of perfume in the land of the Sick? What is this Rodez to you?

Who is Gaston Ferdiere to you, healer of the sick? Inquisitor

or Father God?

What kind

of life is it to be the Only Man dying

over and over again while making love a

prayer for the disembodied, the

body wholly floating never Sated these desires

Carnal and abstract can you

hold me here Now a little while?

We give you crayons and markers to draw with – You

hesitate before the page

are drawn to it

stuttering in your misstep, your

hair cascading starkly in your face

angled and Aware; -- you paint

searching in

rapid cornerings of sense and Circumstance, you

bleed fully here where you

can express yourself, you are art itself, the

remonstrance of a brush, the

killing of Time

itself with crepuscular heaving here where the

mind conflates

reason with Purity yielding a Sacrosanct

intention of knowing

and careful love –

So what

of the Shocks

that wrack your body? Are you Marat overseer

of this Asylum? -- Or

one of the inmates gone Mad

in their Orchestrations?

What do you make of Sade, you

the child fed meningitis

and stale bread your brothers

and sisters

dying before their time you had

to hold

close to your Mother hiding in her skirts

you

the structured Vanity

of a Mute Repose? -- you hear Van Gogh’s cypress

shuddering in the Wind, you

trade your walking-stick for

four white walls and a straitjacket fighting

hallucinatory battles

on-ship with crewmen – that stick

once held by Lucifer, Jesus, and St. Patrick you

believed you surrendered your feminine

face to it, the round edges and violent cuttings

of this Miscreant’s voyage

a starving lesson

of deceit and Courage – Your

rack-Screams

shatter the Night

in your Soul

transformed

in fits of agony and Creation – I have

been with You in these asylums, in these

magic winding buttressed fears, in

helping the Self back to consciousness after

a timed implosion

of longing or Camaraderie -- who Are

these ghosts, phantoms

driven by lust

or fear who transmit

codes of belonging

and Awareness? We stagger

through alleys

drunk on Madness, heaving our passion

to the sky, on the Cross, in

the brackish waters

irate and

impure lingering in Sex shops

and sad diners – Here

where we

can arch our back like Artaud and convulse

with the Moment of

a Sage grown tired with an attainment

that is

subtle but Sharp – We live

the theatre of cruelty

in our very step, our bodies out and awaiting

crucifixion The

ultimate betrayal, the ultimate Service – When

we bear the Cross

and Surge with heat into the intersection we will

know Artaud’s hunger, his

longing for bardo, that odorless state, that

transmission into a world of

occluding Sense and Spirit, there

where we

can instill in ourselves an awe profound as

life Itself –

*