the methodical pacing
   of the distance runner —
at five o'clock in the afternoon —
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom,
and the paint is reticent
 to make the connection
between greens, blues, yellows, and reds. . .
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom.
Christopher Morley said,
"The courage of the poet
is to keep ajar the door
    that leads into madness."
but Madness is always there —
never hidden by artificial doors,
only by the eclipse of the self
  with self —
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom.
We praise the lunatics deliriously
    because they make connections
we are too timid to make —
between ripples on a lake
 and the flow of thought
   through our brains,
between the changing of the seasons
and the rise and fall
 of empires —
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom.
What we fail to appreciate,
        as rationalists —
I sit on bleachers
looking on a field
muddied by the thaw of snow —
  is that we, as human beings,
are learned rationalists
 (not native born) —
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom.
In the window of the painting
there is, isnšt there, an homage
 to something else —
What Chagall vents —
at five o'clock in the afternoon —
is both frustration and mastery
(what he paints is not what he envisions,
and yet the painting itself
is worth envisioning).
We are taught logic in schools —
if A then B and if B then C
 then if A then C —
these syllogisms,
 these Cartesian doctrines,
these straight lines
 that are somehow curved.
What we blind ourselves to,
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom,
and what poets prize
is that we are natural storytellers
 and natural liars,
that we learn best
        through metaphor
and that truth
   somehow
        is what seems right —
Madness
     is in how we think —
 ba-dom, ba-dom, ba-dom
sometimes
  it is the rebirth
            of an idea —
at five o'clock in the afternoon —
   it is the scream
         of the real.