AD.


schizoidman – foto by Smith

Since we’ve expended nigh 9% of the 21st century already, here’s a 21st Century poem I wrote back in the 20th Century.

21st Century Schizoid Man

I’ve got certified rats in my rafters
Of legally voided mind waste
So excuse please these cancerous laughters
This spewing of petrified paste
Vague seekings through demented hereafters
I can’t find my mind’s been misplaced

Electron wails mournful my nay brain
Err trails its zinc aftertaste
This drivel due mad jolting sane pain
Embraces thy sameness posthaste
Dying I burp up my madness again
I can’t find my mind’s been misplaced

of when of where of what am i o god of whom of why
for seeketh then thou me thou see the be that thou belie

– Steven B. Smith, 1973

I wrote this in Loyola College in Baltimore after reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

The poem’s three stanzas each represent one second:

1 – The second before electroshock therapy

2 – The second during electroshock during which the brain is scorched and the patient dies

3 – The second after electrodeath as the confused soul rises from the dead body into the aftermath.

I stole the title from a King Crimson’s song of the same name on their 1969 album In the Court of the Crimson King.

I don’t often explain poems because what I put into them frequently doesn’t equal what people will see or read in them since we each bring our own experience, expectation, perception and view to the equation. This is just to show you what I was thinking at the time. Whatever poem you read here is just as valid as the poem I wrote.


no place like om – foto by Smith

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