The Fane

The Smile

I smiled when I told you

And looked at you.

Kitty died.

I thought you'd care.

I felt you smiling too.

Insidious the treachery

That dwells inside the mad!

A betrayal of their feelings.

They laugh when they are sad.

Therapists are just mistaken.

“Nothing's there at all.”
Either they don't know their business,

Or crazy dreams appall.

 

The Fane

I think such thoughts to make a good man mad.

A briar patch. “Oh, do not toss me in!”
But I'm afraid to think of what I feel.

Just see reflections in my poesy.

Distorted images and paradox.

I begin to smell. I'm getting old.

I rarely bathe. Has Jesus something more

Than life to show recruits? I think he doesn't.

Heaven is a place that's not described.

Everything is quite unspecified.

I am burning temples like the

Failure did in Greece.

If not fame, then infamy.

I don't know his name.

 

Getting Straight

Psychiatrists and preachers

Know the things that motivate

The heinous and the criminal,

And tell you not to hate.

But if you see then loitering

Around your garden gate,

Run them off with vehemence,

And get your thinking straight.

Revival

Walking down a road adorned

With flowers, poesy and death,

The concrete crumbled into hell.

I fell and floundered in the fen

With anger, rocks and hate and flames.

Now that hell has ceased to grip me.

Drifting back to earth I see

A dim reflection in the shadows

Of the songs that used to be.