Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

So I'm an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach thing no song sing but in the word which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my word to comrade from my word to my mother but all my words are one word my lives one my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein I began as a drunkard & ended as a child I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who read radiant newsprint I began physically embarrassing—"bloated"—& ended as a perfect black-haired laddy I began unnaturally subservient to my mother & ended in the crib of her goldenness I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a tiny love's body perfect smallest one But I began in a word & I ended in a word & I know that word better Than any knows me or knows that word, probably, but I only asked to know it— That word is the word when I say me bloated & when I say me manly it's The word that word I write perfectly lovingly one & one after the other one But you—you can only take it when it's that one & not some other one Or you say "he lost it" as if I (I so nothinged) could ever lose the word But when there's only one word—when you know them, the words— The words are all only one word the perfect word— My body my alcohol my pain my death are only the perfect word as I Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers Listen Every me I was & wrote were only & all (gently) That one perfect word