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The Asylum
'London's burning, London's burning,
fetch the books, Fahrenheit 451'
The inmates gawk from our ward's window,
they don't look back,
they walk no further.
(Shakes his head in dismay)
That's right my apple-picking friend,
not much has changed since you fell off the ladder.
I dip my hand into the melting ice of the glass.
I can smell it, I say.
In the fire's waving ecstasy,
I'll try to reap its piquant lick.
Aye, the smoke, as it singes the plastic of my hands.
Inner peace, inner peace,
the monk of Tibet knows,
'I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now'
And breath,
one two,
one two,
and weep,
one two,
one two,
and dance,
sing,
scream!
All the world's seas,
and all the king's lands,
in rapture to fill
My Lord God's hands
Unconquerable shake of the madman's iron grip,
Each four-winged, heartless Pomeranian princess
of a Brother's Grimm fairy tale,
are whispers in the waterfall.
The lady's charm,
the missing marble arms,
oh beauty further than the seas,
cold on my toes she touches,
oh water of timeless blue,
flower of the Cuckoo's rest,
time,
hurries on,
and time,
hurries on.
Her bright linen rags unravel in streaks along the shore stack,
her light guides the wayfarer home,
with her arms stretched out,
she gives into the wind
- the nymph of the Irish coast,
- the naked eyes of her poignant face-
she flies.
Yeats claps me from the corner
with Jonathan Swift and Alexander the Great.
Revelling in mad depths they bare,
damaging in fruits that stare,
modern in thoughts the pair,
of late and drunken dare,
fair in war and hair,
those normal, each and other button-sided hat swallowing foot glove.
Hollow-eyed nurses scorn:
'nobody's right, if everybody's wrong'
Now?
Say nay?
What is it today, to be different?
This isn't the unholy asylum,
I see it on the streets,
in the people, when they garble on their phones
in the teachers, when they tell us what to say
in the shopping centres, where we're told what to buy
on the internet, when they tell us what's wrong about
in parliament.
Who are the mad?
Not I,
I say nay.
Incomprehensible blind prison of three walls and a translucent window!
Inside, shuddering nakedness of a smothered Aristotelian love affair.
Embrace your Platonic future and past!
And if the heavens glance over this tear on the grass,
oh lord,
let its glimmer be me.
Oh lord,
let it be me who shines.
poem
by
Ross Mackay
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