*

Madness? Its power
is to be recognised by the sane.
The insane ignore it.

They are busy with shells,
flowers, the difficulty
of discovering whose face it is

grimacing at them in the mirror.
There is no certainty
that we die when we are dead.

Maybe Dante was right;
maybe hell is inversion,
the becoming an inmate

of the paradise of the insane.
Manacled with equations,
foaming poetry at the mouth,

we still stare through the bones's bars
at those staring in, doing the mind's
trick over and over again to amuse them.