Once Sweet Artaud

I saw clearly,
knew of poor once sweet Artaud
and heard the history of earth
in his lettered pages.
Nobody else
could have told me
so clearly what I already knew.

His sweet canticles
gone unwritten
due to the fear of Septimus.

His frail beauty lost on
his theater audiences that
reduced him to dying over
and over again on stage.

With subtle letters he explained
and explained and explained.
The surrealists thought he raved,
though they merely put Frued in art
while shitting out their subconscious.
Artaud, clever friend, traveled to Mexico
with the sequins of his intellect,
ditching opium as he wandered through
the hall-less wonder of ancient desert,
his mind enraptured with tender details
of a mythic people.

The doctors created his madness,
for doctors do not understand art.

Like why he carried a silver-tipped cane
and struck sparks off the cobblestones
with glib flits of his wrist.

In his torrid merriment, he told the truth
about Van Gogh.

And that is all you need to know about
once sweet Artaud.