THE PUZZLE FACTORY
1. Admission
i.
I want to see someone holy, to confess
The nature of my soul, free with grace
The prisoner of my conscience, to bless
My heart and mind, mend my spirit, trace
In my confusion a sanctity. Can you address
This, say I’m sending for one, place
And time to be chosen. Nurse, lest I digress
From the disorderly matrix of my case
With words, I now ask you to impress
It in your diary. I am out to pace
The healing of my heart. You say bad cess
To me, my illness is the token of a race
Gone to extinction, burned out without will.
Someone will come when I have had my pill.
ii
The priest will come when you have had your pill:
Please sit down or you’ll disturb the sick
Creatures in my care. You are very ill.
This asking for a priest is just a trick
To waste our professional time, kill
With constant wearing down, incessant pinprick
Our repertoire of compassionate nursing skill.
The pill is good for you, just take a lick
The candy coating’s nice. You’re very ill.
He’ll come for sure when you have had your pill.
Your eyes are bulging. I told you you were sick.
Come here, you wretch, stop slinking out the door.
The priest will come. I told you so before.
iii
The priest will soon be here. Nurse said so before.
I can’t believe you’re getting any better.
Double dose, Nurse. And if you hear her roar
Kindly call. I’ve got the very fetter:
But of course we won’t use it. Give her more.
The pills really quieten them. The letter
From her GP I believe she tore—
Up—I think she was declared a debtor
To the bank. A hundred in the red, a score
Of unpaid bills. She’s no go-getter—
Hasn’t the gumption for the daily strife. Store
Her records in this file. Now we can net her
Give her ECT, a woman without a man
I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash-can.
iv
I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash can,
But a few electric shocks will sort her out.
So trusting, a permanent also ran,
A loser, a messer, there’s no doubt
Anxiety personified. I believe she ran
Through the ward in her night-dress. A scout
Saw her clawing at the window. At once a ban
Must be enforced on walking patients. Rout
Their needless guilt and crucifying unsan-
itary nightmares. They cause a drought
Of human sympathy. But then I’m no fan
Of unchecked impulses. And yet a pout
On her dial as I give her the injection.
I smile at her, to show her my protection.
v
We smile at them to show them our protection.
She’s safe now, in the stupour of the drug.
The ECT machine has passed inspection
It’s funny how it makes me feel a thug.
Shock wave, then convulsion and projection
Of limbs flying like a stranded bug.
Her mouth foams. I think its found in section
A of the manual. I don’t want to be smug,
It’s really harmless. But pitiful. Introspection
Punished here. They just need a hug.
But who will hug the face of life’s rejection
Especially now. The heartstrings’ tug
Is dead forever in the electric shock
She won’t remember love that science can mock
vi
You won’t remember love that science can mock.
Well, I’m your social worker. And I see
You’re still complaining about the electric shock.
I haven’t time to discuss loss of memory
You don’t need it, really. The lock
On your door is necessary. The ESB
Were on. The charge. This going into hock
With public bodies has got to stop. Have you VD?
Oh, good. There’s not a problem I can’t knock
Off in three minutes. And Science is free
To bare our secrets, systemise for good the Rock
Of Ages. Nothing, it is clear, can simply be.
There’s solution in sociology. Resistance
Is a Case Study, just needing persistence.
vii
I’m a case study, that just needs persistence.
I rock myself all day. The constant flight
From life’s troubles is my whole existence—
I am tempted to yield to my spirit’s blight
And remember little else. Your assistance
And ECT have burned my memory bright
With tears that can never be shed. The distance
In my eyes shows thread of the dark night
Where mystics have written of the soul. Co-existence
Of chemical pill and mystic insight cannot light
The lamp where my reason had subsistence:
Pills hold me in thrall to nothingness and waste
The sweet spring of my youth now has a bitter taste.
2: Experts
i.
He knew the under-sexed and over-privileged,
Was on to a good thing with hysteria:
Knew these maladies could be treated, wedged
In with a 19th century mendacity feria:
Days when a solitude of young women pledged
A secrecy to incestuous fathers who were weary
Of wives’ costly chilled ardours, hedged
Implicitly in a materialist world. Wisteria
And aspidistra were fecundity. Dredged
From the classical annals of outer Siberia
He made a new codex and creed, alleged
Incestual fantasy the norm. ‘Twould sear ya
But Freud couldn’t see Freud. He couldn’t see
Beyond his own sad childhood fantasy.
ii
Well beyond his own childhood fantasy
Jung sought for spiritual food, was rapt
In a mythic reconstruction of the memory,
Where race enriches the individual, sapped
By his failure to talk to God, to see
Where his life takes him past the untapped
Resources deep in his psyche. A mystery
Of a kind to rescue him where he is trapped
By the ordinary day’s demands. A pharmacy
Cannot store the elixir of life. Wrapped
Within the search, a person finds the key
Deep in his own unconscious, a mapped
Territory to Jung. We cannot blame
Religion or the meaning of the game.
iii
Religion or the meaning of the game
Skinner understood to do with rats.
People were like rats, exactly the same
Only tiresomely mad as bats.
Still, with a few electrodes, shame
Could be seen as extraneous, and pats
On the head an adverse stimulus, a tame
Physical reaction. So congrats.
To the nerve cells, to hurt or maim
Is merely a blind animal impulse, that’s
All. Love is a case, he claims,
Of stimulus and response. Pour that in your vats.
We’ll go on conditioned reflexes down to hell
Or up to heaven, depending on the bell.
iv (Reich)
Heaven doesn’t depend on the bell—
My discovery was the function of the orgasm.
No matter what sex is, just do it well
I sent whole populations into spasm.
When they saw my work was going to sell
They flung me into prison with enthusiasm.
They were certain I should be going to hell
For feeling was a kind of protoplasm:
Medical pros knew I shouldn’t excel
At this peculiar brand of iconoclasm.
The nasty and particular fate that befell
Me has opened up in medicine a chasm—
For the puerile info is, mind’s just a body-smith—
I’m proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith.
v (Szasz)
Proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith!
Some folk would rather have it that they’re crazy
My books set out madness as a myth—
Whatever is socially not aisy
I say power is the only monolith
The kernel of the matter. Being lazy
Is perceived generally as the kith
Of she devils, born of a hazy
Notion that witches were power-smith
For man, not Satan. It was quasi-
Religious views persecuted a fifth
Of women at one time—I’d say none were mad,
But the defiant, the unregenerate, and the bad.
vi (Fromm)
The defiant, the unregenerate and the bad
Were seen by me to be in a fix,
And at bottom, it really makes me sad.
I spend my life wondering how a person ticks
Who can’t love his family, and be glad
To be alive and kick against the pricks
As if he enjoyed it. Instead, we’ve labelled mad
All who can’t love, are hurt. The crucifix
Holds hearts in thrall that daren’t pad
With the cushion of affection, the onyx
Jewel of life. It doesn’t, sorry, add
Up to much. I mustn’t get prolix.
For as you know, my name is Eric Fromm
I’m un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm.
vii (Laing)
He’s un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm
I’m honest, poetic and Glaswegian;
I tend to see the truths that others scorn
That people just want to cry a squidgen
And mostly there are reasons for mind’s storm
Like himself below, their names are legion
But basically reflect what can transform
Love into hate, homely life into region
Of frosty intercourse; failure to conform
In grisly incommunicado. A Collegian
Scorning academic discipline, I perform
Wonders of healing. Without religion.
My name, I’m sure you’ve guessed, is R.D. Laing
To love mankind, I’m doing all I can.
3: Visitors
i
When they visit her I stay downstairs
Beside the office. What goes on upstairs
I can only guess at. I saw my mother
Here. And she looked far away. I was sure
She couldn’t possibly love me any more.
She held me close before the lift doors closed
And whispered “tomorrow” before I nose-
Dived away from her tears. It hurts me still
She didn’t say goodbye, but that the pill
Made her feel that things were going down-hill.
I thought she loved me, her one and only joy -
It’s plain to see I’m not at all a good boy.
She doesn’t care now if I’m bad or good:
The doctors say she’s doing what she should.
ii
The doctors say she’s doing all she should
I always thought she was a little queer;
And I, a friend, have done all that I could.
Why, once she even called me “my dear”
Another time, she told me I was ugly
Because I tried to snatch her little snuggly.
Even with her boyfriends, I was flirty
And she grew morose. I found her dirty
The Irish habit of never ever dusting
Of leaving everything till tomorrow, trusting
The dirt won’t show under the bed.
I guess the men knew they’d never wed
A slut like her. Literary pretension
Leaves in the married state a fierce dissension.
iii
Yes, in the married state there’s fierce dissension
I favoured her. Watched her declension
From mirthful girl tittering at the boys
To serious critic of their serious toys—
Motor cars, drink, sex and nightly snooker—
And going home they’d swear to seeing a Pooka.
Her aversion grew. She saw a paradigm
Between the world’s power games, and mine.
The penile appendage was another projectile
Not in essence different from a missile.
Phallocracy’s the centre of the matter—
We can’t say heart, for fear it would grow fatter—
Her thesis was, the male impulse to kill,
Which she’s now counteracting with a pill.
iv
She’s now counteracting with a pill
All I’ve ever done to make her ill—
My promises to love her were a pain
Which bled afresh like wounds, again,
Prised open with my inexact criticism
Which so often took the form of witticism.
I thought her aspirations smacked of vanity;
I mimicked her, made much inanity
Out of her wholesome hope. She cried
So often I thought our love had died—
But no, it had become a separation
Which became my malevolent inspiration—
It wouldn’t have mattered save I was her spouse
To whom she pledged and swore eternal vows.
v
He to whom she pledged and swore such vows
Was soon discarded. A regular louse
He blackmailed her with threats of suicide
Once he knew that love had really died.
He didn’t love her, but felt a man diminished
When she first told him their thing was finished.
He’d rather move her purposefully, claim
That underneath all women were the same
Though she was bright. But that was her misfortune,
As if she were born to carry a torchon,
Be there if he raped her. That was the bitter end
And thus a woman scorned went around the bend.
Hell may have no fury, but the hospital has more
Treatments to even up the score.
vi
Treatments may even up the score
I saw her crying in the street, pour
Her heart out to strangers. I ran inside
To get her a glass of water. She denied
Who she was. She said her name was Phyllis
But long ago she was known as Amaryllis
Then she said she was a lonely Valentine
Who could see her undoing in red wine
And then she said her name was Holy Mary
And like the nursery rhyme, she was contrary
But not because of cockleshells and bells
But she had seen demons who had lived in hells
Where phantom lusts raged in bodies pure,
She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore.
vii
She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore
I understand, but I wish I knew more—
In general, I’d say she’s very nice
They say that every person has a price
And she had none. She took seriously
Every nuance and tone, even imperiously
Withheld approval at a tincture of a lie,
And she became worse as time went by.
She couldn’t exchange the merest pleasantry
Without her ignoble life, her peasantry
Snapping at her heels with bitter pride
Of ancient lineage. No bartered bride
In work or misery, but trusting to failure
Like babes whose brains had yet no suture
4: The Malady
i
Her song is absence, but her art is absent.
She exists in her own bad faith, a centre
Flying out at her own frozen pace, a dent
In the counterpane of her hated mentor,
Herself. She exists to prove she’s hell-sent
Out of the racket of silent cacophony, dissenter
To the faith in herself she herself bent
In the flying wind, a sad lamenter
Of what is good, is gone. A secret assent
Is wound up in the coils of her tormentor;
Her language locking the floodgates like cement
Now bursting in the tide of being repenter.
Undone with nitpicker’s gravity, like a crime,
Her centre is time, time spent doing time.
ii
Her centre is timeless, time spent doing time
And its slow pace towards healing. Time and again
She pulls apart the treasury of thought, rhyme,
Lets it fall in a cluster on good. Pain
Welcomes the transition, and the undoing, clime
For a fated ego to unblock the drain
Of warm feeling, current for the grime
Encrusted hearts are fed. The purpose plain
Is to loose the vestige of sentiment, climb
Into the turret and throw away the key, main
Chance with the stowaway scissors. Clip the sublime
Tresses. Then throw them to the wind and rain,
Crying “Whatever is, let it simply be
Remember these beauties which are not for me.
iii
Remember these beauties which are not for me
And throw away also the brazen treasure chest
Where I had etched our memories in my blood, see
The unsalutary symptoms of my plague, test
For reference and you will find perfidy
Where once the Queen of Ransoms was thought blessed.
All that issued from my pearlised eyes, the key
You warders stole when trussing up the rest
You called a person, whom you said was free.
Degradations begin at the breast,
Where once the child of happiness went on spree,
Called his mother saint, and father quest.
Now the imp has danced the reel of wrath,
Seeing his mother near a psychopath.
iv
Seeing his mother near a psychopath,
I tear my hair to make the falsehood right
My heart is broken, tell it not in Gath
Or how this lasting daytime’s blight
Has torn my family, who in my wrath
See an everlasting endless night
Inhabited by the spectre of a Plath
Scribbling in the darkness without light
But my darkness is the troubled aftermath
Of the pills and treatment, I am out of sight
And in my place a wretch turns polymath
Garbling in unknown tongues of wrong, to fight
With streeling sense the battle order’s rage.
Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page.
v
Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page,
To make what happened disappear. In fact,
The long slow death of prisoner in a cage
Is paradigm to show we cannot with tact
Alter what has passed. Put on the stage
A show to please the mainstream. Pack
In anguish what can understand our rage
Directed at oneself. It cannot be the rack
Which I am strung upon, it is the age
Abstracted in concerts to show its general tack.
My sickness testament to the malady of the sage
Who exclaims, all is futility. I am proof demoniac
Our time’s neurosis hides eternal truth—
I am the victim of my own timeless ruth.
vi
I am the victim of my own timeless ruth
Compassion never really knew its name till me.
I picked up every brown winged bird, couth
With longing for the south, and set it free
Pushed a leaf off every insect, smooth-
Made the way for every tiny bee,
So all should be free to sing. In youth
I tried a quaver or two, like he
Who charmed the generations, Bob of Duluth:
Yet never felt as free as his songs said we’d be—
Besides, money was involved. And my sleuth
Said, don’t sing for money, for poetry is paid no fee
I believed it, and gave away my song
Sang everywhere I felt I didn’t belong.
vii
I sang in places I did not belong,
I wept in ruins younger than yesterday,
Made every tried logic a fiddler’s song,
Made every song lament that it should pay
Respect to what the culture said was a long
Concept of morality, the pedant’s way
To higher densities of philosophy, a gong
To summon spirits, dismembered and astray
In the rank demonology of the cursed day
God wove weft and warp, and right and wrong
Sent angels upwards, bad spirits in the drey
Where secrets bought and sold for centuries, bong
Out the names of those who die for good.
I am on-beckoned by an infinite sisterhood.
5: Regression
i
The physical and the spiritual entrained
Together, each got a body blow
At the five doors of sense, were trained
To ask “who’s there?" There was no show
Only a dumb anguish, which fear constrained
To mock with a meek smile. It was no-go
Between the spirit and the body. Brained
In the emotions, boxed in chemicals, no
Ordinance of personhood, where once had reigned
Sweet reason. Love was an absent foe
Which hammered constantly to prove it gained
Nothing by execution. It was always so.
History was a fop, a dull conspiracy
And truth was the mockery it could never be.
ii
Truth was the mockery it could never be.
The fact was God, or godless, to be terse.
What happened to the sacred territory
Of “you and me” celebrated in verse,
Popular song, crooned on the radio, free
Our realm of household love and felt in Erse?
Who hears it in the corridors of insanity?
A demonstration of the knee jerk, privy purse
Of medicine’s rendering up of soul to fee.
Knave or fool, the hospital’s daily curse
Reduces to physical reaction, eternal verity.
A matted mass of measly microbes pressed
As in answering a summons. It’s a cod.
Believe in us, not in the one true God.
iii
Believe in us, not in the one true God,
Our name is Legion, and we live by lies.
All who have the reckless midnight trod
On creaking floorboards, have heard our cries.
Once Truth and love and day are gone, a squad
Of demons rushes in with night. And ties
Of birth and blood friendship are odd
Sport to our presence. Where there’s fear, prize
Only what is ours. In the land of Nod
Is the appetiser to our full-blown sway. Spice
At first, we eat the heart away, prod
At the props of decency. We advise
A cunning madness to pay virtue’s toll,
Alienation is our cherished goal.
iv
Alienation from God is our goal,
And so the frantic woman in the den
Of mad lionesses like herself, can roll
Back the dawn of her burnished Imagist pen
That rides high on uncommon destiny, a role
To astonish history: to parade in the fen
Of amazed critics who astutely poll
Her chances of pulling off the impossible: zen
Hell turned to heaven, a bartered soul
‘Twixt good and evil. Faust again,
This time a woman. And did the dice roll.
How near she came to surpassing men
Comprehending paradigms of moral weight and swoon!
This gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom.
v
Her gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom
On which bad faith depended, and bad luck
Though all the doors were opened to that room
Of life abundant, she preferred to truck
With half-baked notions, that needed a zoom
Lens to enliven, bring the monstrous ruck
Of materialist philosophy to its destined tomb
With indifferent scorn and second-fiddle schmuck.
She pipped such notions that have need to vroom
Down the fables of casual accidental muck
That so-called scientists call the present boom
Of wealth, indecent waste, and pass-the-buck
Philosophy. Hers was the chilling answer—
Merit must be found, even if it were cancer.
vi
Merit must be found, even if it were cancer,
And right must be subsumed for wrong to flourish.
The scars must be telling, a gut-lancer
Not the healing power of God and good, perish
The thought. Ms. Average is a shoddy chancer
Thrown out the window for normalcy to cherish,
A viper in the bosom turned necromancer
Which makes even her last few days currish
In the extreme, snapping at the heels of a dancer
Whose departed spirit love has failed to nourish.
In his pop-eye stare the last great romancer
As she bites the dust of a lifetime’s demurrage:
Being sorry for oneself is jumping the gun,
Saying no to life before it has begun.
vii
Saying no to life before it has begun
Refusing to take part in one’s own story
Being sorry for oneself can be such fun
Not accepting one’s part in Creation’s glory
Is just a way of saying, I’m going to shun
This life of accident, appalling gory
Strife and competition. Attila the Hun
Had the size of it. We’re doomed a priori
To murder, bloodshed, before our race is run!
I will abstain from this compact of fury
Leavened in the gloom of mind. No sun
Will shine its light. A ribald Tory
Mocking rebellion in the frenzied fray,
I’ll die before I live to fight a day.
6: In the Corridor
i
The first cut was the deepest, the jangle
Of many keys upon a laundered breast,
The thud of silence, after the wrangle
That ensues between the keeper and the rest.
He’s not on till noon, this rota’s in a tangle
Can I, with sanity and eyesight blessed
Make sense of it? I’d ask you to wangle
Another bed in the upstairs ward – Depressed –
I’ll keep her there. It’s like being in a mangle
With psychotic, manic. It puts to test
Our professional forebearance and our angle
Of objectivity. She needs to be caressed;
But we can simulate with pills and shocks
The nature of our nursing and our locks.
ii
The nature of our nursing and our locks
Are intertwined in tight conspiring bonds:
Our chief deterrent, a kind falsehood, rocks
The towers of belief. The magic wands
Of doctors’ pencilled orders, the lonely nox
Of dreamless sleep keeps lies in ponds
Where like trapped fishes, the poor soul knocks
At the glass bowl of truth; to correspond
With fact its punitive task. Deadlocks
Of intuition and of sense, and diamond
Of a dark jeweled head. A soul’s rot,
Self a forever-running vagabond.
Lies added to lies make fiction grate,
Upon the brain, a client of the state.
iii
The nerveless brain, the client of the state
Is now the subject of much ripe canonic:
Nerveless of course it’s not, it’s just late
In registering emotion – unTeutonic.
Or should we say, it registers a rate
Unsuitable for programming. Quiet histrionic.
A bandaged soul is not the proper fate
For one dignified as man/woman. It’s ironic
To call us human when the experts prate
Of matters manic-depressive or catatonic.
Why can’t we be normal, find a mate?
Why be platonic and demonic?
But in straps and chains the State no longer dresses
Those whose being a bad entity possesses.
iv
Those whose being a bad entity possesses
Will find a chink in their immortality.
What began as admonishment regresses
To where good is not a necessary
Part of the fabric. Instead it dresses
Up with lures to attack with finery
Of thought and diction the unschooled messes
Of adolescent putting on of agony.
Fearful violation of self presses
Against the grain of ineluctable reality
And the often sought after caresses
Contain the essence of the germ “to be”
Gone putrid, dank with fright and with dismay
A violation of all that for which we used to pray.
v
A violation of all that for which we used to pray
Brings us to the hospital’s grey door
Our alter ego standing in the way
Of “I” shouts “Rape me no more!”
With your shard of promises. Now I pay
Dearly with my dream’s life store
I put off learning to be human, say
Now I was wrong. I know your lore
Of madness, debauched reality, lay
At your feet my broken self. It’s sore
To have carried the load such a long way,
So out of touch. I know the score.
Your tranquillising chain, your strait-jacket
Await me with instructions on the packet.
vi
Awaiting me like instructions on the packet
Are tortures both medieval and new.
In darker days the sick kicked up a racket
And it put visitors off, (like at Kew).
It’s nice to know my treatments in a bracket
With bloodletting, hot water, and the pew
Where I was taught to sing hymns. A placket
Round me, and the infirmary screw
Tight around my neck. I’d like a whack at
The orderly who tells me what to do
But mostly, I’d like to put a tacket
In that deep frenzied heart to which I’m clew
And worm-eaten puzzle. And yet I thole
Daily in hopes God will mend the hole.
vii
Daily, in hopes God will mend the hole
I shrive out in tiresome counterfeit
I can’t be said, to own, at all, my soul
And see myself always in defeat—
A nicety. Conjecture and the whole
Triumph of order, science and mercy-meat
Ground out in daily routine. And the role
Of patient is to be her own compleat
Invalid, see herself as droll
Carbon copy of a great deceit
She has no right to herself. A pigeon hole
Is perfect metaphor, she’s obsolete
In the great life-game. She’s out of kelter
Here she will find unremitting shelter.
7: The Cure
i
Heaven, if depending on the bell
Could be on earth, if we could get it right—
If we could make positive the hard sell
To keep us doped on optimism through the night;
How lies and fibs we’d never tell
To ears whose eyes were allowed the sight
Of something good. And in our cell
Of-nothing-is-under-the-sun-but-it's-right
We’d call love into question, sound the knell
Forever on the famous serpent bite
In history nothing went wrong, tell
No story, nor children hear a fight
Psychologists tell us another fairy tale
It hinges on the blaming of the female.
ii
It hinges on the blaming of the female
The matter, mater, matrix of our song
That she should live and yet could tell the tale
And do justice to herself, right the wrong,
But ambiguity is dressed in shyness, scale
By which is measured, protesting, long
Improbability. That she did not rail
Against conception, suffered silence, did not bong
Out the names of her betrayer, gave a pale
Image of her integrity. A fiery tongue
And truth locked in shame, indeed to fail
To vindicate her honour had her hung
Not in a gossip column, a rolling crown,
But in the mental health hospice of a town.
iii
In the mental health hospice of a town,
The brain is deemed a strange and complex thing:
No one understands, it is admitted with a frown,
But there’s no knowing what experiment can bring.
Our cunning chemicals and knowledge bring renown
And soul and spirit, anachronism, ring
Of medieval superstition. We drown
The patient in our pills, a fairy queen
Reduced to blubber. He blubbers. Down
The hatch. You’ll get fat, probably sing
Only one song of the hundreds that you own—
Synapses seared with poison, heart a broken wing,
And eyes that bulge with knowledge that has spoiled
God’s work mangled in the serpent’s coils.
iv
God’s work is mangled in the serpent’s coils
And stares out, a beheaded, gibbous post
The pure subtlety of intellect, soiled
And little left, wandering as a ghost—
The self has been killed. Where one had toiled
To mine the diamond heart in suffering’s most
Difficult moments, now reduced and boiled—
A globule to replace a sacred host.
The body’s gross distortion, now foiled
Of natural grace, on the moneyed coast
In the profession’s gutter, a slovenly gargoyle
Shows the profitable nature of the toast
They raise to themselves “Control is the way
On man-made pills we have the final say.”
v
“On man-made pills we have the final say –
Here’s to procrastination. I’ll earn my pension
Of dull days with no combat’s edge to pay,
Or decorate my feigned interest’s pretension.”
Somehow, there was hope in the urge to pray
An end to constant friction, tension,
To bring living peace. I shouldn’t mention
Survival of the fittest was the way
Our natural historian’s notable dissension
To edge God out of the picture, to betray
With nonchalant vocation a whole Being’s declension,
Reduce the power of thought, and good, to lay
Wreaths at the feet of a secular, concerned world,
While centuries of philosophy underneath whirled.
vi
Centuries of philosophy underneath whirled
And on a raft of confused fear, I pay
Respect to the one’s jealousy which hurled
Mistrust of the ages, am witch to say
Whether I sink or swim. Yet I am furled
On the flag of disrepute, dishonour, may
Be called mad. When my hair was curled
And my dress pressed, I was eager, nay,
Clumsily anxious for your praise. You purled
My plain, turned rival in the fray
Like a mother wishing a daughter gnarled,
A jealous eye undermined my day.
I keep looking for the good friend who’ll smile
Who, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled.
vii
She, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled
Nor will she freeze the summer with her frown
When she consults Britannica, finds there filed
References she heard only in the town
Yet I was familiar with. Me, that clown,
Now out of hospital, whom she’s reviled
To every acquaintance. “She’s really down
Poor thing, she’s swallowing pills, piled
High in charactery in her cabinet. Her academic gown
Worth nothing, like her scroll. I dialed
The holograms on her pills, a disjointed crown
Got me the doctor. A roof could be tiled
With what she’s taking. He’s found the right palliative
The exact chemistry—her brain’s co-relative.”
1. Admission
i.
I want to see someone holy, to confess
The nature of my soul, free with grace
The prisoner of my conscience, to bless
My heart and mind, mend my spirit, trace
In my confusion a sanctity. Can you address
This, say I’m sending for one, place
And time to be chosen. Nurse, lest I digress
From the disorderly matrix of my case
With words, I now ask you to impress
It in your diary. I am out to pace
The healing of my heart. You say bad cess
To me, my illness is the token of a race
Gone to extinction, burned out without will.
Someone will come when I have had my pill.
ii
The priest will come when you have had your pill:
Please sit down or you’ll disturb the sick
Creatures in my care. You are very ill.
This asking for a priest is just a trick
To waste our professional time, kill
With constant wearing down, incessant pinprick
Our repertoire of compassionate nursing skill.
The pill is good for you, just take a lick
The candy coating’s nice. You’re very ill.
He’ll come for sure when you have had your pill.
Your eyes are bulging. I told you you were sick.
Come here, you wretch, stop slinking out the door.
The priest will come. I told you so before.
iii
The priest will soon be here. Nurse said so before.
I can’t believe you’re getting any better.
Double dose, Nurse. And if you hear her roar
Kindly call. I’ve got the very fetter:
But of course we won’t use it. Give her more.
The pills really quieten them. The letter
From her GP I believe she tore—
Up—I think she was declared a debtor
To the bank. A hundred in the red, a score
Of unpaid bills. She’s no go-getter—
Hasn’t the gumption for the daily strife. Store
Her records in this file. Now we can net her
Give her ECT, a woman without a man
I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash-can.
iv
I’m tired of helping them out of life’s thrash can,
But a few electric shocks will sort her out.
So trusting, a permanent also ran,
A loser, a messer, there’s no doubt
Anxiety personified. I believe she ran
Through the ward in her night-dress. A scout
Saw her clawing at the window. At once a ban
Must be enforced on walking patients. Rout
Their needless guilt and crucifying unsan-
itary nightmares. They cause a drought
Of human sympathy. But then I’m no fan
Of unchecked impulses. And yet a pout
On her dial as I give her the injection.
I smile at her, to show her my protection.
v
We smile at them to show them our protection.
She’s safe now, in the stupour of the drug.
The ECT machine has passed inspection
It’s funny how it makes me feel a thug.
Shock wave, then convulsion and projection
Of limbs flying like a stranded bug.
Her mouth foams. I think its found in section
A of the manual. I don’t want to be smug,
It’s really harmless. But pitiful. Introspection
Punished here. They just need a hug.
But who will hug the face of life’s rejection
Especially now. The heartstrings’ tug
Is dead forever in the electric shock
She won’t remember love that science can mock
vi
You won’t remember love that science can mock.
Well, I’m your social worker. And I see
You’re still complaining about the electric shock.
I haven’t time to discuss loss of memory
You don’t need it, really. The lock
On your door is necessary. The ESB
Were on. The charge. This going into hock
With public bodies has got to stop. Have you VD?
Oh, good. There’s not a problem I can’t knock
Off in three minutes. And Science is free
To bare our secrets, systemise for good the Rock
Of Ages. Nothing, it is clear, can simply be.
There’s solution in sociology. Resistance
Is a Case Study, just needing persistence.
vii
I’m a case study, that just needs persistence.
I rock myself all day. The constant flight
From life’s troubles is my whole existence—
I am tempted to yield to my spirit’s blight
And remember little else. Your assistance
And ECT have burned my memory bright
With tears that can never be shed. The distance
In my eyes shows thread of the dark night
Where mystics have written of the soul. Co-existence
Of chemical pill and mystic insight cannot light
The lamp where my reason had subsistence:
Pills hold me in thrall to nothingness and waste
The sweet spring of my youth now has a bitter taste.
2: Experts
i.
He knew the under-sexed and over-privileged,
Was on to a good thing with hysteria:
Knew these maladies could be treated, wedged
In with a 19th century mendacity feria:
Days when a solitude of young women pledged
A secrecy to incestuous fathers who were weary
Of wives’ costly chilled ardours, hedged
Implicitly in a materialist world. Wisteria
And aspidistra were fecundity. Dredged
From the classical annals of outer Siberia
He made a new codex and creed, alleged
Incestual fantasy the norm. ‘Twould sear ya
But Freud couldn’t see Freud. He couldn’t see
Beyond his own sad childhood fantasy.
ii
Well beyond his own childhood fantasy
Jung sought for spiritual food, was rapt
In a mythic reconstruction of the memory,
Where race enriches the individual, sapped
By his failure to talk to God, to see
Where his life takes him past the untapped
Resources deep in his psyche. A mystery
Of a kind to rescue him where he is trapped
By the ordinary day’s demands. A pharmacy
Cannot store the elixir of life. Wrapped
Within the search, a person finds the key
Deep in his own unconscious, a mapped
Territory to Jung. We cannot blame
Religion or the meaning of the game.
iii
Religion or the meaning of the game
Skinner understood to do with rats.
People were like rats, exactly the same
Only tiresomely mad as bats.
Still, with a few electrodes, shame
Could be seen as extraneous, and pats
On the head an adverse stimulus, a tame
Physical reaction. So congrats.
To the nerve cells, to hurt or maim
Is merely a blind animal impulse, that’s
All. Love is a case, he claims,
Of stimulus and response. Pour that in your vats.
We’ll go on conditioned reflexes down to hell
Or up to heaven, depending on the bell.
iv (Reich)
Heaven doesn’t depend on the bell—
My discovery was the function of the orgasm.
No matter what sex is, just do it well
I sent whole populations into spasm.
When they saw my work was going to sell
They flung me into prison with enthusiasm.
They were certain I should be going to hell
For feeling was a kind of protoplasm:
Medical pros knew I shouldn’t excel
At this peculiar brand of iconoclasm.
The nasty and particular fate that befell
Me has opened up in medicine a chasm—
For the puerile info is, mind’s just a body-smith—
I’m proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith.
v (Szasz)
Proof of sanity, sensation’s zenith!
Some folk would rather have it that they’re crazy
My books set out madness as a myth—
Whatever is socially not aisy
I say power is the only monolith
The kernel of the matter. Being lazy
Is perceived generally as the kith
Of she devils, born of a hazy
Notion that witches were power-smith
For man, not Satan. It was quasi-
Religious views persecuted a fifth
Of women at one time—I’d say none were mad,
But the defiant, the unregenerate, and the bad.
vi (Fromm)
The defiant, the unregenerate and the bad
Were seen by me to be in a fix,
And at bottom, it really makes me sad.
I spend my life wondering how a person ticks
Who can’t love his family, and be glad
To be alive and kick against the pricks
As if he enjoyed it. Instead, we’ve labelled mad
All who can’t love, are hurt. The crucifix
Holds hearts in thrall that daren’t pad
With the cushion of affection, the onyx
Jewel of life. It doesn’t, sorry, add
Up to much. I mustn’t get prolix.
For as you know, my name is Eric Fromm
I’m un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm.
vii (Laing)
He’s un-ambitious, loving, and quite warm
I’m honest, poetic and Glaswegian;
I tend to see the truths that others scorn
That people just want to cry a squidgen
And mostly there are reasons for mind’s storm
Like himself below, their names are legion
But basically reflect what can transform
Love into hate, homely life into region
Of frosty intercourse; failure to conform
In grisly incommunicado. A Collegian
Scorning academic discipline, I perform
Wonders of healing. Without religion.
My name, I’m sure you’ve guessed, is R.D. Laing
To love mankind, I’m doing all I can.
3: Visitors
i
When they visit her I stay downstairs
Beside the office. What goes on upstairs
I can only guess at. I saw my mother
Here. And she looked far away. I was sure
She couldn’t possibly love me any more.
She held me close before the lift doors closed
And whispered “tomorrow” before I nose-
Dived away from her tears. It hurts me still
She didn’t say goodbye, but that the pill
Made her feel that things were going down-hill.
I thought she loved me, her one and only joy -
It’s plain to see I’m not at all a good boy.
She doesn’t care now if I’m bad or good:
The doctors say she’s doing what she should.
ii
The doctors say she’s doing all she should
I always thought she was a little queer;
And I, a friend, have done all that I could.
Why, once she even called me “my dear”
Another time, she told me I was ugly
Because I tried to snatch her little snuggly.
Even with her boyfriends, I was flirty
And she grew morose. I found her dirty
The Irish habit of never ever dusting
Of leaving everything till tomorrow, trusting
The dirt won’t show under the bed.
I guess the men knew they’d never wed
A slut like her. Literary pretension
Leaves in the married state a fierce dissension.
iii
Yes, in the married state there’s fierce dissension
I favoured her. Watched her declension
From mirthful girl tittering at the boys
To serious critic of their serious toys—
Motor cars, drink, sex and nightly snooker—
And going home they’d swear to seeing a Pooka.
Her aversion grew. She saw a paradigm
Between the world’s power games, and mine.
The penile appendage was another projectile
Not in essence different from a missile.
Phallocracy’s the centre of the matter—
We can’t say heart, for fear it would grow fatter—
Her thesis was, the male impulse to kill,
Which she’s now counteracting with a pill.
iv
She’s now counteracting with a pill
All I’ve ever done to make her ill—
My promises to love her were a pain
Which bled afresh like wounds, again,
Prised open with my inexact criticism
Which so often took the form of witticism.
I thought her aspirations smacked of vanity;
I mimicked her, made much inanity
Out of her wholesome hope. She cried
So often I thought our love had died—
But no, it had become a separation
Which became my malevolent inspiration—
It wouldn’t have mattered save I was her spouse
To whom she pledged and swore eternal vows.
v
He to whom she pledged and swore such vows
Was soon discarded. A regular louse
He blackmailed her with threats of suicide
Once he knew that love had really died.
He didn’t love her, but felt a man diminished
When she first told him their thing was finished.
He’d rather move her purposefully, claim
That underneath all women were the same
Though she was bright. But that was her misfortune,
As if she were born to carry a torchon,
Be there if he raped her. That was the bitter end
And thus a woman scorned went around the bend.
Hell may have no fury, but the hospital has more
Treatments to even up the score.
vi
Treatments may even up the score
I saw her crying in the street, pour
Her heart out to strangers. I ran inside
To get her a glass of water. She denied
Who she was. She said her name was Phyllis
But long ago she was known as Amaryllis
Then she said she was a lonely Valentine
Who could see her undoing in red wine
And then she said her name was Holy Mary
And like the nursery rhyme, she was contrary
But not because of cockleshells and bells
But she had seen demons who had lived in hells
Where phantom lusts raged in bodies pure,
She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore.
vii
She was, she wept, a virgin and a whore
I understand, but I wish I knew more—
In general, I’d say she’s very nice
They say that every person has a price
And she had none. She took seriously
Every nuance and tone, even imperiously
Withheld approval at a tincture of a lie,
And she became worse as time went by.
She couldn’t exchange the merest pleasantry
Without her ignoble life, her peasantry
Snapping at her heels with bitter pride
Of ancient lineage. No bartered bride
In work or misery, but trusting to failure
Like babes whose brains had yet no suture
4: The Malady
i
Her song is absence, but her art is absent.
She exists in her own bad faith, a centre
Flying out at her own frozen pace, a dent
In the counterpane of her hated mentor,
Herself. She exists to prove she’s hell-sent
Out of the racket of silent cacophony, dissenter
To the faith in herself she herself bent
In the flying wind, a sad lamenter
Of what is good, is gone. A secret assent
Is wound up in the coils of her tormentor;
Her language locking the floodgates like cement
Now bursting in the tide of being repenter.
Undone with nitpicker’s gravity, like a crime,
Her centre is time, time spent doing time.
ii
Her centre is timeless, time spent doing time
And its slow pace towards healing. Time and again
She pulls apart the treasury of thought, rhyme,
Lets it fall in a cluster on good. Pain
Welcomes the transition, and the undoing, clime
For a fated ego to unblock the drain
Of warm feeling, current for the grime
Encrusted hearts are fed. The purpose plain
Is to loose the vestige of sentiment, climb
Into the turret and throw away the key, main
Chance with the stowaway scissors. Clip the sublime
Tresses. Then throw them to the wind and rain,
Crying “Whatever is, let it simply be
Remember these beauties which are not for me.
iii
Remember these beauties which are not for me
And throw away also the brazen treasure chest
Where I had etched our memories in my blood, see
The unsalutary symptoms of my plague, test
For reference and you will find perfidy
Where once the Queen of Ransoms was thought blessed.
All that issued from my pearlised eyes, the key
You warders stole when trussing up the rest
You called a person, whom you said was free.
Degradations begin at the breast,
Where once the child of happiness went on spree,
Called his mother saint, and father quest.
Now the imp has danced the reel of wrath,
Seeing his mother near a psychopath.
iv
Seeing his mother near a psychopath,
I tear my hair to make the falsehood right
My heart is broken, tell it not in Gath
Or how this lasting daytime’s blight
Has torn my family, who in my wrath
See an everlasting endless night
Inhabited by the spectre of a Plath
Scribbling in the darkness without light
But my darkness is the troubled aftermath
Of the pills and treatment, I am out of sight
And in my place a wretch turns polymath
Garbling in unknown tongues of wrong, to fight
With streeling sense the battle order’s rage.
Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page.
v
Suppressed, my fever is to tear the page,
To make what happened disappear. In fact,
The long slow death of prisoner in a cage
Is paradigm to show we cannot with tact
Alter what has passed. Put on the stage
A show to please the mainstream. Pack
In anguish what can understand our rage
Directed at oneself. It cannot be the rack
Which I am strung upon, it is the age
Abstracted in concerts to show its general tack.
My sickness testament to the malady of the sage
Who exclaims, all is futility. I am proof demoniac
Our time’s neurosis hides eternal truth—
I am the victim of my own timeless ruth.
vi
I am the victim of my own timeless ruth
Compassion never really knew its name till me.
I picked up every brown winged bird, couth
With longing for the south, and set it free
Pushed a leaf off every insect, smooth-
Made the way for every tiny bee,
So all should be free to sing. In youth
I tried a quaver or two, like he
Who charmed the generations, Bob of Duluth:
Yet never felt as free as his songs said we’d be—
Besides, money was involved. And my sleuth
Said, don’t sing for money, for poetry is paid no fee
I believed it, and gave away my song
Sang everywhere I felt I didn’t belong.
vii
I sang in places I did not belong,
I wept in ruins younger than yesterday,
Made every tried logic a fiddler’s song,
Made every song lament that it should pay
Respect to what the culture said was a long
Concept of morality, the pedant’s way
To higher densities of philosophy, a gong
To summon spirits, dismembered and astray
In the rank demonology of the cursed day
God wove weft and warp, and right and wrong
Sent angels upwards, bad spirits in the drey
Where secrets bought and sold for centuries, bong
Out the names of those who die for good.
I am on-beckoned by an infinite sisterhood.
5: Regression
i
The physical and the spiritual entrained
Together, each got a body blow
At the five doors of sense, were trained
To ask “who’s there?" There was no show
Only a dumb anguish, which fear constrained
To mock with a meek smile. It was no-go
Between the spirit and the body. Brained
In the emotions, boxed in chemicals, no
Ordinance of personhood, where once had reigned
Sweet reason. Love was an absent foe
Which hammered constantly to prove it gained
Nothing by execution. It was always so.
History was a fop, a dull conspiracy
And truth was the mockery it could never be.
ii
Truth was the mockery it could never be.
The fact was God, or godless, to be terse.
What happened to the sacred territory
Of “you and me” celebrated in verse,
Popular song, crooned on the radio, free
Our realm of household love and felt in Erse?
Who hears it in the corridors of insanity?
A demonstration of the knee jerk, privy purse
Of medicine’s rendering up of soul to fee.
Knave or fool, the hospital’s daily curse
Reduces to physical reaction, eternal verity.
A matted mass of measly microbes pressed
As in answering a summons. It’s a cod.
Believe in us, not in the one true God.
iii
Believe in us, not in the one true God,
Our name is Legion, and we live by lies.
All who have the reckless midnight trod
On creaking floorboards, have heard our cries.
Once Truth and love and day are gone, a squad
Of demons rushes in with night. And ties
Of birth and blood friendship are odd
Sport to our presence. Where there’s fear, prize
Only what is ours. In the land of Nod
Is the appetiser to our full-blown sway. Spice
At first, we eat the heart away, prod
At the props of decency. We advise
A cunning madness to pay virtue’s toll,
Alienation is our cherished goal.
iv
Alienation from God is our goal,
And so the frantic woman in the den
Of mad lionesses like herself, can roll
Back the dawn of her burnished Imagist pen
That rides high on uncommon destiny, a role
To astonish history: to parade in the fen
Of amazed critics who astutely poll
Her chances of pulling off the impossible: zen
Hell turned to heaven, a bartered soul
‘Twixt good and evil. Faust again,
This time a woman. And did the dice roll.
How near she came to surpassing men
Comprehending paradigms of moral weight and swoon!
This gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom.
v
Her gift to herstory wedged the crack of doom
On which bad faith depended, and bad luck
Though all the doors were opened to that room
Of life abundant, she preferred to truck
With half-baked notions, that needed a zoom
Lens to enliven, bring the monstrous ruck
Of materialist philosophy to its destined tomb
With indifferent scorn and second-fiddle schmuck.
She pipped such notions that have need to vroom
Down the fables of casual accidental muck
That so-called scientists call the present boom
Of wealth, indecent waste, and pass-the-buck
Philosophy. Hers was the chilling answer—
Merit must be found, even if it were cancer.
vi
Merit must be found, even if it were cancer,
And right must be subsumed for wrong to flourish.
The scars must be telling, a gut-lancer
Not the healing power of God and good, perish
The thought. Ms. Average is a shoddy chancer
Thrown out the window for normalcy to cherish,
A viper in the bosom turned necromancer
Which makes even her last few days currish
In the extreme, snapping at the heels of a dancer
Whose departed spirit love has failed to nourish.
In his pop-eye stare the last great romancer
As she bites the dust of a lifetime’s demurrage:
Being sorry for oneself is jumping the gun,
Saying no to life before it has begun.
vii
Saying no to life before it has begun
Refusing to take part in one’s own story
Being sorry for oneself can be such fun
Not accepting one’s part in Creation’s glory
Is just a way of saying, I’m going to shun
This life of accident, appalling gory
Strife and competition. Attila the Hun
Had the size of it. We’re doomed a priori
To murder, bloodshed, before our race is run!
I will abstain from this compact of fury
Leavened in the gloom of mind. No sun
Will shine its light. A ribald Tory
Mocking rebellion in the frenzied fray,
I’ll die before I live to fight a day.
6: In the Corridor
i
The first cut was the deepest, the jangle
Of many keys upon a laundered breast,
The thud of silence, after the wrangle
That ensues between the keeper and the rest.
He’s not on till noon, this rota’s in a tangle
Can I, with sanity and eyesight blessed
Make sense of it? I’d ask you to wangle
Another bed in the upstairs ward – Depressed –
I’ll keep her there. It’s like being in a mangle
With psychotic, manic. It puts to test
Our professional forebearance and our angle
Of objectivity. She needs to be caressed;
But we can simulate with pills and shocks
The nature of our nursing and our locks.
ii
The nature of our nursing and our locks
Are intertwined in tight conspiring bonds:
Our chief deterrent, a kind falsehood, rocks
The towers of belief. The magic wands
Of doctors’ pencilled orders, the lonely nox
Of dreamless sleep keeps lies in ponds
Where like trapped fishes, the poor soul knocks
At the glass bowl of truth; to correspond
With fact its punitive task. Deadlocks
Of intuition and of sense, and diamond
Of a dark jeweled head. A soul’s rot,
Self a forever-running vagabond.
Lies added to lies make fiction grate,
Upon the brain, a client of the state.
iii
The nerveless brain, the client of the state
Is now the subject of much ripe canonic:
Nerveless of course it’s not, it’s just late
In registering emotion – unTeutonic.
Or should we say, it registers a rate
Unsuitable for programming. Quiet histrionic.
A bandaged soul is not the proper fate
For one dignified as man/woman. It’s ironic
To call us human when the experts prate
Of matters manic-depressive or catatonic.
Why can’t we be normal, find a mate?
Why be platonic and demonic?
But in straps and chains the State no longer dresses
Those whose being a bad entity possesses.
iv
Those whose being a bad entity possesses
Will find a chink in their immortality.
What began as admonishment regresses
To where good is not a necessary
Part of the fabric. Instead it dresses
Up with lures to attack with finery
Of thought and diction the unschooled messes
Of adolescent putting on of agony.
Fearful violation of self presses
Against the grain of ineluctable reality
And the often sought after caresses
Contain the essence of the germ “to be”
Gone putrid, dank with fright and with dismay
A violation of all that for which we used to pray.
v
A violation of all that for which we used to pray
Brings us to the hospital’s grey door
Our alter ego standing in the way
Of “I” shouts “Rape me no more!”
With your shard of promises. Now I pay
Dearly with my dream’s life store
I put off learning to be human, say
Now I was wrong. I know your lore
Of madness, debauched reality, lay
At your feet my broken self. It’s sore
To have carried the load such a long way,
So out of touch. I know the score.
Your tranquillising chain, your strait-jacket
Await me with instructions on the packet.
vi
Awaiting me like instructions on the packet
Are tortures both medieval and new.
In darker days the sick kicked up a racket
And it put visitors off, (like at Kew).
It’s nice to know my treatments in a bracket
With bloodletting, hot water, and the pew
Where I was taught to sing hymns. A placket
Round me, and the infirmary screw
Tight around my neck. I’d like a whack at
The orderly who tells me what to do
But mostly, I’d like to put a tacket
In that deep frenzied heart to which I’m clew
And worm-eaten puzzle. And yet I thole
Daily in hopes God will mend the hole.
vii
Daily, in hopes God will mend the hole
I shrive out in tiresome counterfeit
I can’t be said, to own, at all, my soul
And see myself always in defeat—
A nicety. Conjecture and the whole
Triumph of order, science and mercy-meat
Ground out in daily routine. And the role
Of patient is to be her own compleat
Invalid, see herself as droll
Carbon copy of a great deceit
She has no right to herself. A pigeon hole
Is perfect metaphor, she’s obsolete
In the great life-game. She’s out of kelter
Here she will find unremitting shelter.
7: The Cure
i
Heaven, if depending on the bell
Could be on earth, if we could get it right—
If we could make positive the hard sell
To keep us doped on optimism through the night;
How lies and fibs we’d never tell
To ears whose eyes were allowed the sight
Of something good. And in our cell
Of-nothing-is-under-the-sun-but-it's-right
We’d call love into question, sound the knell
Forever on the famous serpent bite
In history nothing went wrong, tell
No story, nor children hear a fight
Psychologists tell us another fairy tale
It hinges on the blaming of the female.
ii
It hinges on the blaming of the female
The matter, mater, matrix of our song
That she should live and yet could tell the tale
And do justice to herself, right the wrong,
But ambiguity is dressed in shyness, scale
By which is measured, protesting, long
Improbability. That she did not rail
Against conception, suffered silence, did not bong
Out the names of her betrayer, gave a pale
Image of her integrity. A fiery tongue
And truth locked in shame, indeed to fail
To vindicate her honour had her hung
Not in a gossip column, a rolling crown,
But in the mental health hospice of a town.
iii
In the mental health hospice of a town,
The brain is deemed a strange and complex thing:
No one understands, it is admitted with a frown,
But there’s no knowing what experiment can bring.
Our cunning chemicals and knowledge bring renown
And soul and spirit, anachronism, ring
Of medieval superstition. We drown
The patient in our pills, a fairy queen
Reduced to blubber. He blubbers. Down
The hatch. You’ll get fat, probably sing
Only one song of the hundreds that you own—
Synapses seared with poison, heart a broken wing,
And eyes that bulge with knowledge that has spoiled
God’s work mangled in the serpent’s coils.
iv
God’s work is mangled in the serpent’s coils
And stares out, a beheaded, gibbous post
The pure subtlety of intellect, soiled
And little left, wandering as a ghost—
The self has been killed. Where one had toiled
To mine the diamond heart in suffering’s most
Difficult moments, now reduced and boiled—
A globule to replace a sacred host.
The body’s gross distortion, now foiled
Of natural grace, on the moneyed coast
In the profession’s gutter, a slovenly gargoyle
Shows the profitable nature of the toast
They raise to themselves “Control is the way
On man-made pills we have the final say.”
v
“On man-made pills we have the final say –
Here’s to procrastination. I’ll earn my pension
Of dull days with no combat’s edge to pay,
Or decorate my feigned interest’s pretension.”
Somehow, there was hope in the urge to pray
An end to constant friction, tension,
To bring living peace. I shouldn’t mention
Survival of the fittest was the way
Our natural historian’s notable dissension
To edge God out of the picture, to betray
With nonchalant vocation a whole Being’s declension,
Reduce the power of thought, and good, to lay
Wreaths at the feet of a secular, concerned world,
While centuries of philosophy underneath whirled.
vi
Centuries of philosophy underneath whirled
And on a raft of confused fear, I pay
Respect to the one’s jealousy which hurled
Mistrust of the ages, am witch to say
Whether I sink or swim. Yet I am furled
On the flag of disrepute, dishonour, may
Be called mad. When my hair was curled
And my dress pressed, I was eager, nay,
Clumsily anxious for your praise. You purled
My plain, turned rival in the fray
Like a mother wishing a daughter gnarled,
A jealous eye undermined my day.
I keep looking for the good friend who’ll smile
Who, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled.
vii
She, seeing me well and happy, won’t be riled
Nor will she freeze the summer with her frown
When she consults Britannica, finds there filed
References she heard only in the town
Yet I was familiar with. Me, that clown,
Now out of hospital, whom she’s reviled
To every acquaintance. “She’s really down
Poor thing, she’s swallowing pills, piled
High in charactery in her cabinet. Her academic gown
Worth nothing, like her scroll. I dialed
The holograms on her pills, a disjointed crown
Got me the doctor. A roof could be tiled
With what she’s taking. He’s found the right palliative
The exact chemistry—her brain’s co-relative.”