Acceptance Speech

This time I’m not going to say a thing about deity. It’s not the blizzard, it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing roofs, ruined crocus pronging through. Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again. Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw. A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon, Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu, we know you’re in there but no one’s blaming you for reluctance to come out. Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him: toothlessness and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant in a steakhouse turned out to be more than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot of time in an asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough. In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape in two rows of shapes that seems okay although to the right’s a capsized canoe full of mathematicians, to the left a bow about to launch the killer astrolabe. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? How about climbing a ladder of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s lying in some red dust, munching a thorn. You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong. See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds which is about average for a cloud. Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred. Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated planet. I know, a promise has been made but Tony’s been sick for years and no one knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures, corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone you’d trust to drive your car, but still. Something awful’s coming, isn’t it? Would it help if I said Amen?