Ode to Artaud

 

He threw a handful of dirt
Into the open grave
Of his own face
And with chattering teeth
Ate there the bared earth
Of delirium
From which he was born.

And his face, a field of death,
Being empty,
Became a door
Through which he welcomed
The angels he needed-
Madness and hallucinations that were real,
An absolute abyss
That opened straight like the bound jacket
Of a book not written,
Not written with words, undefiled,
Opening to a reality
That only the mad
Would consent to read,
To a play stage

That only the mad 

Would consent to attend.

Entering the land of the shamans
Strung-out, deranged, packed half-dead on a horse, 
In high deserts he danced with the ghosts of natives
Among the mountain cacti, escaping reason.

At this borderline, he was deported back
To the land of the sleepwalkers
And, in extremis, performed a drama in Paris streets of death,
A dans macabre, spasming in electro-shock.
A dance-step halfway between thought  and gesture
Inside a theater of cruelty,
An asylum house for insane shepherds
Who won the crown of laurel for cracked eclogues
In those hills where the logic of lies was subverted
In search of the poetry of new laws
To end mental slavery.

Artaud knew hell
Could be escaped
Only through the ruthless discipline of art.
His art looked into the very bottom of things

As he gazed down into an open grave.  

To Bukowski: I Just Wanted To Let You Know That...

Your challenges to the dark
That you hurled, over and over, through a window-
That magically unbreakable radio

Of your raging, drunken voice 

That you tossed through the broken glass of your page.

 

Those nearby, your friends in the darkness,

Can hear it still every night, loud and clear,

In that alleyway of words you spilled

Like low-life rotgut, blaring Mahler or Mozart.

And all the windows your verse
Broke, hungover, black-eyed, shattered in that alley,
They walked through shards of glass
But still managed somehow to get to work- to get written-
Because they had guts...they had a Joan of Arc style.

They were attracted to dangerous living, like her,

But had no intention of becoming a saint.

Yet they knew of martyrdom

Framed in hard times and obscurity.

They knew of the life of a tortured poet

Who ironically became the patron saint

Of anti-social asshole poets,

Who drank, bet on horses, and fought too much,

But was an intriguing character

And a decent writer.

Every morning, unhinged,
You'd haul those broken windows down the street
To get a new pane, like a fresh page,
That you'd insert into the tombstone of your typewriter
And fill with junk yards, city dumps,
Fill with madhouses, with hospitals, fill with graveyards,
Fill with a life lived along the edge of a grimy alley.

Creating yourself there, a self-invention from your typewriter,
You punched the keys in the face to let them know who was boss
And hurled the radio of your voice that night, drunk again,
Through the windows of emptiness and pain.

As the number of shattered windows climbed
Into the hundreds
You just went on breaking them
Although you realized that
You had created, in your words,
 "Very little."

But that radio kept on playing...

A sardonic confession

Like the first movement of Beethoven's Opus 101

That strikes at the wry and nitty-gritty

With a casual, plaintive voice.

 

I hear it playing there

In all the broken glass

Of your life and verse. 

Notes: this poem draws heavily on a poem CB wrote called, "A Radio with Guts."