CANTO ET RESPONDU

Quiet, I hear

Them. They come and go,

The people who aren't quite there.

I sit, forgetting even as I hear.

I ponder the fluid dynamics, the flow

Of the liquid psychosis.

Why? I suppose 

That nature abhors a vacuum.

Entities rush in to fill the emptinesses.

Right now, I am aces

But that's not the point.

I should have died (and did)

Years ago. No, wait -

These people are mad at me,

Becoming more so as they realize that I did not know.

[NOTE: Canto et Respondu was my first cycle of poetry that exceeded what I felt I had accomplished in my juvenilia. Those were high times when I started out! I was recently homeless and in a little studio in San Francisco's Tenderloin. I was just starting afresh amid Jon Eichelberger's hunting me, and enduring the occasional gross abuse by medical professionals on their shifts. Psychosis, though I know what it is, that is to say, in no way a true depiction of the world outside the psychotic's oppressive and cruel head - psychosis (hearing voices, suffering intrusive thoughts, the dysphoria of "mind rape," et cetera) was nevertheless a salient ingredient in my waking life and in my nighttime dreams. It was one of the many lenses through which I could glimpse the universe around me, and there was what there was to it. Canto et Respondu verily lept from my skull in a sort of parthenogenesis onto the World Wide Web. With that blog, the cat was out of the bag, and I was having a full on conversation with myself in public, a conversation intended to address the phenomenon of psychosis, to give it a poetic gloss. I understand that it is still read by many a psychiatric patient, perhaps as a go-to or touchstone!]