Salvador Dali

insulin coma

Broadcasting over the radio, to her,
Alone in a crowd, portraying the human
She used to have been, tranquil, emotionally
Adhered to supporting the War, reasoning
The walk in the dark, stepping on dried
Leaves crumpling inside her brain,
She takes a walk, for the earth is shaking,
And she wakes up in a shaking panic,
She can not feel,
Senses only pain, but acutely aware
Of her senses, twisting the objectivity
In the science of mental illness:
A function of the state, driven by affectations,
And rage,
She can feel her bubble poked,
The reason why she’s hiding from the
Piercing stingers, claws and beaks,
Seeking to devour her liver, Prometheus,
And the god’s singing in mercurial relevancy,
Pushing the boundaries, disguised and thrown
To the filthy green sea, where there are no birds,
Only aquatic sadness, and lonely dreams
To come, when she finds herself alone,
Listening to the radio talking directly to her,
Referential ideas, rockets of professional
Doubt, screaming across the maddening sky

each with a specific desire

The play with time was so uncanny…an alien time seemed to dawn.
--schizophrenic patient



Throughout the ward, patients, each with a specific desire, talked incessantly of freedom; some from the physical constraints of their captivity, some merely from the shackles of thought. Suffering, yes, of course, but madness itself is an escape, and if not a dismissal from their institutionalization, then at least the satirical fantasies of the morbid dream bends the world, shaking away the empty cobwebs so adherent to the passersby, worshiping their logic, denying the pain of understanding those hidden from the world inside box cars racing through tunnels, discovering that there is more to this existence than the pounding pressures of modernity.
These men and women speak in foreign tongues now, disguised in atypical methods of dissembling the puzzle pieces, breaking the picture, holding the gold; they wait, in verbose chatter while the nurse makes her rounds, delivering the chemicals to straighten them out, to put the world back in perspective, to see the falsehood transparency overlying the truth of insanity.
Psychosis, a dream in which they could not wake up, and feel the cycling of the sun piercing the sounds of lucidity, an insomnia of the soul. The plague of consciousness pulling downward on their brains, wanting so badly to reach out and place God in light of their suffering, but they simply laughed in hysteria at the distortions of their senses.

Paranoia

Together we swarm the bee hive,

Poised to sting, to puncture the

Thin skin of the collective consciousness,

Where all lies dormant, needing not

Pinning one’s blight upon the

Mosaic of veracity’s pompous virtue,

To befriend the loneliest shades of grey,

And fall into another gyre, twisting and

Rapidly firing neuron after lugubrious neuron,

Into the brain of the communal whole,

Catching insanity as if a bee keeper,

Selling us as if we were commodity,

Bartering for a beseeched request to leave,

Depart from the under-current, and live

Forever above the languidly rotating wheel,

All while the eye watches us, seeing

Emptiness of these times as though

It were a comedic affluence,

All and all, all for Them.

The Madhouse at Saragossa

Fransisco Goya "Corral De Locos"

psychosis is a puzzle

The fact of the psychosis is a puzzle to us. They are the unsolved problem of human life as such. The fact that they exist is a concern of everyone. That they are there and that the world and human life is such as to make them possible and inevitable not only gives us pause but makes us shudder.
----Karl Jaspers
General Psychopathology

ergot

Shimmering lights reflected

On a sheet of anguish, delight,

And emptiness distract the soul’s

Vision of a new tomorrow, one

Absorbed in hue of a warm red and gold

Sunset overlooking a placid stream of thought,

Only to be shattered once again by the annoyance

Of the cerebral vacuum held inside the candle’s

Spherical glow, attracting insects to feed on

The brain’s cavity, chewing on synaptic clefts as if

The strands of dendrites were leaves of grass,

Green with nutrients, only now, brittle and cold

As the dawn of the new era of modernity

Takes hold of the fear of nothingness: and the

Prismatic rays are now beams through a window

Of a vacant building, swarming with ghosts hidden

For all time behind the glass of a padded room.