Life In Sanity Poem by Etienne Charilaou

Waxing gibbous moon
masquerading as cloud.
Do you wish you could draw like Brian Froud?
‘the painting that ate paris',
a Doom Patrol story lies completed.
A wonderful thing, wonderful things
in the wings, like two lovers
stealing a kiss between scenes.

Nice beverages, I propose
a toast to things of yore,
and things to come, things
I'll not run from.
Sad to say, mad today, to this
very day.

Almost unhinged in foul
corners of bespeckled matter,
grey, odious, at odds with
my humanity.
A shell.
A broken shell
of a ne'er-do-well
Hospital passes, drank from
champagne glasses, spilt some:
always a tedious clean-up.

Down, where dank lies mouldy bits
and worms pulse through hideous
and normal.

Brains are blasted, wasted, spent.
And I know, ‘It goes. Time goes.
But it's ok - it's meant to be this way.'

For so long I was trapped
like something in prehistoric amber,
just waiting for the chip and cleave
of the palaeontological axe, as it were.

Now free like the proverbial
butterfly reborn, testing wings,
diaphanous things but now
turned leathery: foul creature:
a man/bat, vampire, vulture
loathsome to incandescence,
bulbous, a toad is far more
beautiful a creature,
than I.

And now comes a Birthday!
what new horrors and terrors
lie in store, in wait,
like a steel-jaw trap (outlawed and cruel)-
I'll have to gnaw my own foot off.
I'll have to lick the wound
and pray it heals or I'm done for -
maybe this time I'll be truly
on my way, way out,
in a dusty lane of the Milky Way,
a rogue planet, like some lost
Newtonian sphere, flung far,
aimless in the void
but returning home all the same.

For that is the game, the entire
thing and Hindu and other pantheons
continue to baffle, if not markers
of mystical truth.

So, unhindered I fly:
a man without wings,
levitation try, gross
understatement of things.
I'm already there, I'm
already gone (nobody can see) ,
Buddha-to-be (but not, you see) .

My final act is a disappearing one.
No before, no after,

no one
but
forever
and ever
and ever.