A Madness Permeates the Air

Years ago, and sometimes still, I recorded my dreams in a little spiral notebook kept near the bed. The first page of the book contains, written badly using a calligraphy pen (of course), the first part of _Row, Row, Row, your boat_, which I must’ve thought quite clever. Most of the entries are the usual dream stuff — monsters, sex, flying, falling, biting — you know. One entry however takes the form of a poem. I don’t remember writing it, but I do remember reading it the following morning and thinking I was somehow not entirely sound. It goes like this…

It never had occured to me
The way it has to be
is never never only what it should be

Some this some that some other
kid forgets his mother
then take the wasted lives of one another

It never seemed I never saw
true light shine out and on and all
the things that come up/down before the fall

The growth the life before the rise
But once I looked into those eyes
Not knowing what could crawl out of the skies

Peaks first then ebbs it shrinks and grows
Aroma smelled not with the nose
A thorn has fallen from life’s withered rose

Once dust once ash a Phoenix came
from out of pointed angry blame
And nothing else has ever done the same

Over up and once thought dead
A voice that rang in angels’ heads
Now sings a song of loneliness instead

Not gone not here not anywhere
A madnes permeates the air
Strips all and one and thing completely bare

And spoken with a raspy breath
While looking down upon the earth
“All the meek inherit now is death.”

Whatever that means.

February 12, 2006 Poem Reply by email