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You're Not Mad Enough

You’re not mad enough to understand my poetry.
Suffering hasn’t twisted you into strange shapes
like a hangman’s apprentice
practising knots with your spine
or driven your innocence out into the desert
like a scape-goat for the sins of others
until you had mastered their evil
and become a great devil
condemned to do good
as if it were the most exquisite torment
of the damned.
You’ve never stood like an exile
at a sleepless window
and listened to the night rain
speaking in a foreign language.
Your electrons have never
been bumped out of their orbitals
like the photonic refugees
of a radioactive element
with half an afterlife
that can see in the dark
and last for millions of years.
What tongue-tied tuning fork
of a pygmy atom
like the emperor of Austria to Mozart
seeing a galaxy
or hearing a symphony
indicts a cosmic conception
beyond the diminutive perception
and bent event horizons
of a black dwarf
for too many stars
too many notes?
You can’t taste the new wine
until it’s been poured
into the same old dirty cup of a mind
you’ve been drinking from
like the bloodless goblet of the moon for years.
Long breath
short breath
don’t they both go on forever
like poems you can’t measure for a straitjacket?
You want to make haikus out of hurricanes.
You want to time the wind
when it blows your house down.
You’ve sat down among your peers
at a designer seance
and studied literature
as if you were communing with ghosts
who had the decency not to show up in the flesh.

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