10-24-2014, 08:36 PM
Madness nestles in vessels of blood
and you don’t fault a fellow for a fever
or blame a wagon for its broken wheel.
Drinking, dicing, his first-born disappoints him,
reading oppressive melancholia
on the Moral and Physical Thermometer.
Sanity breeds in regular habits -
bleeding, purging, mercury, emetics;
the aptitude to judge like other men.
Escorted home, cobwebbed, uncombed,
no tongue or eye for kith and kin;
as familiar as The King of Babylon.
Heresy, buggery, blasphemy and theft
are bodily diseases oozing out
of each incautious orifice.
Father, doctor, shrink and gaoler
confined him in his own asylum
to wear deep gutters in the basement stone.
A hospital bed is not a prison cell.
The Gyrator and the Tranquiliser
are kinder than the stake or the noose.
He came home once and returned much worsened;
father’s footsteps too long, too certain.
Madness nestles in vessels of blood.
and you don’t fault a fellow for a fever
or blame a wagon for its broken wheel.
Drinking, dicing, his first-born disappoints him,
reading oppressive melancholia
on the Moral and Physical Thermometer.
Sanity breeds in regular habits -
bleeding, purging, mercury, emetics;
the aptitude to judge like other men.
Escorted home, cobwebbed, uncombed,
no tongue or eye for kith and kin;
as familiar as The King of Babylon.
Heresy, buggery, blasphemy and theft
are bodily diseases oozing out
of each incautious orifice.
Father, doctor, shrink and gaoler
confined him in his own asylum
to wear deep gutters in the basement stone.
A hospital bed is not a prison cell.
The Gyrator and the Tranquiliser
are kinder than the stake or the noose.
He came home once and returned much worsened;
father’s footsteps too long, too certain.
Madness nestles in vessels of blood.
Before criticising a person try walking a mile in their shoes. Then when you do criticise that person, you are a mile away.... and you have their shoes.