Post-Psychosis Poems

While I am retired as a professional poet I penned a few verses last year to help process my experience

These are a few of them

T H R O U G H W A Y 

The entrance to hell is a hospital hallway 
that Eschers in on itself in perennial circuits

Each door leads eventually to another hallway 
that leads back to where you came from 

but different 

The deeper you go the slower things get 
a day becomes a week and then a month

Your single breath here fills the time 
it takes to sing a hymn outside 
you’re dying 

The physics of hell is perpetually distortive 
light comes off as cruel    

and when you say you’re hurt 
they’ll hear you want to hurt them 

There is nothing you can do about this 
except to accept it 

Be quiet be calm become a mechanism seamless
as the steal scaffolding and blend

It is not through the intercom but in your head
that the litany begins

a not-so-quiet voice announcing every stupid thing 
you hadn’t realized you’d done 

You walk you listen and if you want to make it 
through you must relent and comprehend 

if you want to make it trough you must release 
the desire to make it through 

completely 

I N E S C A P A B L Y Y O U R S

In the architecture of reality stands a man
who is positively and correctly certain
you are nothing special

who plays the game of bait and batter 

like an inverse-bodhisattva
banking on your eager please sir may I
while he twists the tail of an ouroboros
through the lips and spins the cosmic opera
like a nineties game show wheel
screeching: money !

There are many texts that confirm this:
The king of saturn, mara, musk
spinning matrixes like love bombs,
cheshire-grinning, finger-licking
and pretty cute for an engineer

I faced him and it made me slowly
spontaneously combust
like fighting fire with straw effigies
to whatever-the-hell
I thought I was ::: nothing special

M I R R O R   M A Z E 

I’m not embarrassed per se 
by what I was 
but I recognize it
at every step 
as both grotesque 
and stunning 

R I P P L E   R E V E L I N G 

You haven’t the slightest clue what is it to be a frog 
and I pity you that but I misspoke 

I can not know with absolute certainty 
that you do not know what it is to be a frog 

I don’t know you 
you could in fact spend a good deal of time being a frog 

You could be a full-time frog briefly manifest 
as a human on the A train reading a book by a woman 

who has also been a frog
thinking wow how fun the harmony of ponds

P O L K A R O O

Be a child in Ontario in the nineteen eighties 
with me for a little while 

not in the typical way but beneath it 
in a place of cartoon mayhem 
not sinister but insane and sort of genius 

Reality at this point is not fixed 

The child uploads a design to the board
something immutable & inevitable 

She has just ruined the entire game 
and she is not even four-years-old

The board is the world 
the game is how the big men play it  
and the girl is a catastrophe 
in pink pyjamas