The madness has a memory, I found this out long ago — it might be the first thing I learned of it. The madness has a memory, and it is my memory, used against me. The madness has a voice, and it is my voice, used against me. It is me against me, me outside the power of me, inside me. And yesterday, I woke with my heart broken, inexplicably, and I wondered what portent it might be, a sign of what, exactly? Then late in the night I understood, in these days where I feel myself healing, finally, where I have had previews of what it might be to have a mind that is whole again: it was the madness’ despair, that the curse left by the demon understood, with my understanding, that it is dying. Even that was used against me. But let me not complain at such things. Pain is not always bad.
how cynical and small is the technology of possession
instead to be as miracles are, rare and high
to watch what the stars dream on a clear night
(o that the self in selfishness would slip from my humors)
for i am still stained by darkness now fled
between the night and the waking of the senses
the clear air that enters into the mind with the light
to know all i have, i have been given, except my mistakes
the infinite kindness at the very root of being
and the names of God: the faces of his children
With small clouds of dust, life blows on by. I never get a clear sight of it: every time I am about to catch up to it, its wheels (or is it its legs?) speed up, and it races off into the distance again. It’s as if I am forever a remnant of the past, that there are people creating the future, right now, but I shall never know just what that is like, being even too slow to experience the present, lagging behind the current and genuine hours. Have I spent too much of my days dreaming? Was I not once young, ahead of the speed of all this progress, or was that a dream, too? I think back, and wonder at the youth who let these things slip by, imagining that time would never forget him. I let go of the reins of life, back then, thinking I could catch up, just race and seize things again. But look at me, who can only see what he has done, knowing not if what he does right now affects anything, if there really is a future at all. Time flies.
