The cataclysm of the modern

For Christopher Columbus

For Christopher Columbus

He stood on his mountain and sang,

Songs of deliverance and rape and torture,

He sat down and prayed to his lord:

His gold and his silver.

He cried out to his slaves,

To lay down and give up their arms,

For they were to be cut off,

If not an ounce of rare metal was

Derived from the mines.

And he dreamed of sickness

Being the greatest soldier of all,

Taking care of the heathens—

Taking care of his swelling dignity

Tardive Dyskinesia

Tardive Dyskinesia



A new beginning, a cemented truth,

Holding the animal inside, hidden,

Lost from the bubble world outside

This nearest heaven,

Where reasons corpulence

Split the pants of the rapture,

To be lost without creatures

Jumping through barricades

In search of a forgotten time

Making rhymes in the dark,

Without the savior’s romance

To grab hold of me,

Shake me,

Pin me down,

Chemical straightjacket,

And stinging bees lament,

I fell from the sky

Long before there was the moon

High in the air,

Holding down the oceanic tides,

With the love

Sadness and forsaken humility

Of pernicious hatred

For normalcy all around,

While I stand here shaking,

Lost in tardive dyskinesia,

And filled with the bone cold

Tiredness of last week’s wine,

Colored sanguine red, happy,

Elated I felt the rocking

Of my own chair,

Higher than the prayers covetousness—

All before the horrible asp, bending

Her tail for to strike me down,

To the frozen ground below me,

And I sit here in loneliness,

And I sit here in pride,

As the sun’s wild eclipse,

Breaks through optics

Of another world—

Peering into another time,

When emotions felt real,

And the anchoring

Of time and distance were

The fashions of the day,

With her in my arms again,

Sighing with her sweet breath,

Hanging the whispers in the air,

As if an ethereal glow

Was emitted

By the horrible beauty

Of loss and redemption,

Caught up in the throes

Of the antipsychotic;

Tearing through my brain

Like lobotomist’s drill,

Pushing and pulling all dentrites

And remarkable kindling of a fire

In my heart,

Broken by the drug’s evil allure,

Proud as the chemical’s vice

Flowing through my thin veins.