Artaud in Mexico

Wearing his coyote death mask,
he tells the clueless Tarahumara
Rimbaud never met a French poet he
didn't disdain.
Eats peyote by the handful
from a painted gourd,
intuits the last words Sam Peckinpah
spoke to God,
reads A Season in Hell
by firelight
next to a graveyard
with its
fanciful colored metal crosses
and plastic
flowers;
chants: one must be absolutely
modern!
as the incantatory clouds climb like
smoking gun blossoms high over
Sierra Madre.

The Indians have mercy on this
tattered schizoid soul, install his
junkie ass upright on a drunken mule
for the long road home.
They recognize a kindred spirit
when they see one,
his garish, provocative nature not
at all at odds with
the fellaheen.

They dig his otherworldliness,
his seer's heart.

-John Macker
August/2011