The Toll of Madness

Madness has taken its toll.
Where once there were opinions,
now there is laughter.
Where once there were rare gemstones
Now there are waves of sparkling uncertainty.
The earth tilts toward the womb.
The sun cries, thirsting for black milk.
Silence cannot contain its own emptiness
and fills our bones with dust.
We must listen to the gong of the raven
that unties the vagus nerve
from it root in the anus
and it’s needle eye in the forehead.
Lost in the desert between
those firmly nippled opposites
we may still find some chalice
buried in the pulverized cathedrals
of hope.
First offer a drink of sand
to the ancestor who betrayed you.
Then taste the magnificent ashes
of your own fire.
I do not know what these words mean,
but I know they will carry me like raptor wings
into the tropical depression of your breast,
which is just another caesura
in the rhythmic echo
of a world without voices.
Now let us open eight billion mouths
to the diamond cave of zero.



Painting: Marc Chagall