Madness

is an uncomfortable syllable on my tongue, as though fighting for its life.  The welling of words that doctors surround it with drowns its simplicity, as though it were more than what it is.  Loud and loutish I spark and sizzle within its grasp.  Crazy can fall into any category as smooth as baby’s skin.  It eats chaos.  It is alive and unlovable.  It seethes under my epidermal layer with the fluid lucidity of a fish in water.  I want to enter into it and drown in its motherly suffocation.  I need great gulp of a fascist lunacy to subsist.  It comes as natural to me as breathing.  In repression I take no food and stop paying attention to mirrors.  I am both partial and unused, a wreck of wasted breath.  I resign from the world, straining toward coherency.  I remember bits and pieces, selective adjectives, and discordant diaries.  The world slides away in shards, sorrowful and lost without its purpose.  I find myself recycling memories, recalling fractures of conversations, and reusing phrases from old poetry.  Nothing seems to fit.  My eyes glaze over with age and still I am unable to process or comprehend the intimate, visceral loss of conscious direction.  But the world tilts on its axis and moves by dispassionately.  I am no longer stable on its revolution.  Its consistency muddles the mess of my mind.  As a wound, my delirium sucks in all it encounters, bleeding out the people who brush it with their distractions.  I walk about like a braggart, stuffed into my oversized clothes, eating nothing, touching nothing, saying nothing, knowing everything.  Images scatter when I touch them, like reflections in water.  What is there to do with this contagion hanging over me?  What indeed is left to say?  It has seen my unbelievable conceit and has taken my vocabulary like a surgeon would take a tumor.  It has left me wholly crippled down the right side of my imagination … a censure of sorts.  Delusion has a conscientious objection to my arrogance and bites my language in two.  Now with a forked tongue I turn my collar up and stride off into a world of massive silence.