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.