After the style of W. H. Auden
Some say it’s like an acid trip
That lasts a month or three,
Some say your mind is squatted by
Demonic tenancy.
He thinks I’ve touched the other world,
But she thinks I’m a creep.
Both may be right; the fact remains
I’m in the soup, and deep.
Does a person just slowly accrue it,
Does it burst like the death of a star?
Does the cosmos come swarming into it
Like hornets through windows ajar?
Is it loss or a surfeit of Reason,
Is it drably or colorfully clad?
Does it bloom only once, or in season—
Oh, what is it like to go mad?
Some gaze into the void and mourn,
Losing their hope withal;
Such vacancy relaxes me
(Though it’s a bit banal).
Deranged imagination yet
Is the abyss I fear:
The ship that’s tempest-tossed and whelmed
Without a star to steer.
Did Fantasy bloat like a leaven;
Were you crushed by despair in a cell?
Were you stroked by the finger of Heaven
Or strafed by a soldier of Hell?
Did you chant like a cadre of druids
Whose rites make their deities glad?
Were you smothered in bodily fluids—
Oh, what is it like to go mad?
The brain’s an organ, functioning
For definite avail;
But contemplate the awful fate
Should this one organ fail.
Mortality ensues when stops
The flow of blood and breath,
But thought gone wrong shall generate
A living, waking death.
