Now we’re talking about the myth that says
All genius is insanity,
And madness is the end of poetry;
If being alive, feeling Spring’s breath, Summer’s lust
and sweat, Autumn’s razor sadness, Winter’s
hibernative sleep;
If being hypnotized by a girl’s pleasured smile, the
dream aurora hovering over her skin, the heat and
floral musk rising from her cleavage, the
subterranean ba-dum of her heart sounding the
depths of an ocean;
If wanting to sing along with the ravens, chickadees,
mockingbirds and owls, to chime in with human
music as if this human heart were a bird;
If wanting to shine with the fireflies on drowsy April
evenings, their lights marking rhythm to the
symphony of crickets, cicadas, tree frogs;
If crying for the lilac forest in front of the porch
where an invisible witch held court, with a cage full
of spiders keeping watch from eyes as numerous as
stars, crying over it cut down without a trace, save
for mutilated stumps, only for being wild;
If praying for a feral kitten fallen down the well below a
rusted hand pump no longer pumping wasps
nesting in the red rough spigot, praying for the kitten
mewing and mewing until it slowly drowned;
If disavowing war and the cold and calculated games of
power—Power: tiny frightened mouse hysterics,
refuses to admit its mouseness and so stands in front
of the Divine Madhouse spotlight to throw its
frenzied shadow on the world–the insanity that
drives it, froth flys from hard lips that prophesy: all
else is insane except for he, the mouse a mote in
God’s searching eye, and so will now light one
atomic match to spit flame and wrath and cleanse all
creation of matter’s dirt and dust;
If seeing through the lies layered like dust of ages over
the lids of our eyes and our spirits, illusions of
illusions swung back and forth and back and forth
the ticks of clocks of clocks in towers clocks on walls
clocks on wrists clocks in pockets watches of little
pendulums that only swing in one direction ever
forward never backwards never forgiveness for
mistakes never compassion never mercy–Time, the
all-devouring demon Buddhists chant to wake,
escape from–Time, the beating heart of God that
starts from zero ends at zero never moves yet always
flowing–a hundred years for a flower’s blossom,
fifteen hours for a gnat, a thousand eons in a
heartbeat for a note played so sweetly in concertotime,
the greatest freedom if the ticking stops and
moments flow synchronized with what’s above and
what’s below–Time, the stoniest prison walls, a
Chinese water-torture clock once Infinity is chopped
and minced to hours minutes seconds;
If dreams and visions, insights, trances felt, believed
in, incubated, nursed like babies on the tit of mosthigh
divine undrugged unfettered human
imagination, communiqués from other minds
showering like God’s gold coins, commentary on
daily lives like Kabbalah parables on Leviticus laws to
show that mundane lives are never so mundane
but full of sap and eyes asleep, and dreams go by like
rivers whether toes dip in or not. And why not dip
the toes in? Why not roll up pant legs to the knees?
Why not– the day is hot, the sun is hot, the river of
dreams from purest glaciers on mountain tops,
Earth’s muscles of rock–bead by bead, water drips,
coalesces into torrents rush so eager to refresh the
lives down here in shadowed vallies like children
happy to see Daddy home from war;
If tending to the fire burning first as spark, then
ember, then consuming flame inside, inspiring poetry
of first sun-rise, then notching poems like flaming
arrows arced into squalid huddles of covered wagons
to rouse the could-be lovers, friends, compadres,
future clowns and fellow nomads to leap into the
great Outdoors, turn off TV’s and leave the cars, no
DVD’s no radios no power-games no politics no
forced church service no gain no loss no fear, no
schizophrenia no bipolar no ADD, no paranoia no
aberrations of the mind, only right-mind there for all,
the birthright of one and all, the poetry of leaves and
grass and sun and sky and wordless language in lights
of eyes back and forth to other eyes, and all things in
creation finding a place to live and breathe in
blessed freedom in the conscious great big mind of
everything-that-is;
If wanting to love simply, like a child sometimes loves,
loving past accumulated sorrows, madness, anger,
twisted machinations born of hunger, fear of not
existing, not accepted, not seen, not wanted, loving
past the monsters hiding under every private bed,
loving past the blank scar tissue where hairs will
never grow, nerves never feel, tattoos never take, to
the little ball of light, dancing on a pin like ecstatic
angels’ flight, ever young, ever fresh, indifferent to
how aged and over-ripe the flesh, the flesh dreamed
to house it as a temple, Hindu splendor falls
prostrate before it;
If all of this is mad, then I am mad!
If all of this is mad, let’s all be mad!
Why not? The day is hot-
The concrete and the asphalt
Refute the gift of sunlight,
Distort our days of visions,
Heat waves break mirages
That would remind us of Eden,
And every second feels it slip away,
Slip away,
Further in the grottoes of a seeming-ancient time,
Further back the labyrinth of our fractured modern
minds—
Why not be mad?
Why not be mad?
So much time wasted
On reasons to be sane,
Living in the margins
Of a zero-sum game-
Put it all together
Only to watch it change, so
WHY
NOT
BE
MAD!?!?!?!?!?!!!
