The Insight in Madness

There is so much more to the mind than the arbitrary definitions we circumscribed it with.

In the late dead of night, I stood speaking to the stars
I came off the road I had rode for as long as I could remember
A road of unbroken lines and unquestioned rules
I knew it for many years but only then did I reconcile it
The swirling and the pacing and the confusion in everlasting darkness
For it all finally came to the fore that night and I began engaging it
I stood in dialogue with the somnolent stars and
Peeled and cracked apart the many skins and shells of my mind
There is a line, very ill-defined, that one supposedly stands on either side of
But I asked the stars and they confirmed what I had wondered for so long
That one can walk the line, stepping to either of its sides at will
And never be left victim to the order or the chaos of one or the other
I spoke, mad and unmade, and I listened, mad and unmade
To all that was told me and all I wished to have answered
I saw, at long last, the framework beneath all things
I saw the moulding and dismantling of matter and thought
I saw all this beauty and showered myself in the primordial energy
For all is energy, in all things and in all beings and in all thought
Just as there are universes in the bursts of chemical reactions
In the heights of ecstasy and the utter chaos that is love
Love—love is a wondrous disaster of continuous motion
A rapid coming together of things and simultaneous disintegration
Love is an infection, a plague, a virus—a disease of body and mind
And in it is perfection; in it there is the insight known to the stars
All of this in a conversation with billion-year balls of fire
And with every word I uttered I breathed force, breaths of infinite force
I was careering, like a wayward comet born in a yester-millennium
Opening and shutting all the doors and portals that I came across
I came as a naive, stubborn, immature child and grew into something more
A being composed of the living and the dead, the new and the old
A dream crashing into reality—only the dream and reality are one and the same
And, inevitably, my dialogue was assailed by the vilest of things: fear.
Yes, I know now: it was fear that held me back for so many years
It was fear that lied to me, that kept my dream and my reality forcefully apart
Fear is restriction and restriction is the antithesis of my evolution
But I found the way to annihilate fear, and it was the simplest of acts
I just stopped bothering with the world that I knew and
Began listening to the worlds that lived within and around me
My mind became liquid, permeating every thing that I had feared before
I subsumed, I subsumed like an insatiable black hole, subsuming even light
And thus, I subsumed the very stars I conversed with—
Or was it they who consumed me and my body and my mind and my soul?
I shall never know, for I now am in all things, for I am all things, as I have ever been
I once spoke to the stars, up so high and so far, and I leapt across the universe
Losing and finding myself, gaining the insight I once feared in my madness

M.M. — 21-Jun-2015

The Atlas of Her Body*

*Taken from "Death Triumphant" by My Dying Bride

In a flurry of fire and hail and thunder
I fell before her, I fell right down before her
Into the maelstrom swirling in her eyes
I fell a hopeless fool, in complete surrender

I was wrecked upon her porcelain shores
Left dizzy and intoxicated by splendour
And bereft of all reason by the ardour
And savage passion I had not known before

A hapless explorer and conquistador
I sought to map the atlas of her body
From the plains that at a touch turned ruddy
To the rivulets that wound in her hair

Aimless and yet diligent, I coursed all about her
Eager but circumspect, I gauged her in every measure
Across all terrain that I could sustain
I had her in every detail, from body to mind untame

What ecstasy there was in her secret places
And the spectrum of all her hidden faces
Her rolling hills soft and smooth like down
And timbered limbs that kept me bound

I roamed and roamed till I could no more
Till all was known to me, both inland and shore
I here, a fallen castaway fallen to her love
Knowing bliss beyond that of the Above

M.M. – 18-Jun-2015

12:49 a.m.

12:49 a.m.

And so I sit here, in the dark, under the madcraft of night, besieged by the demons of insomnia, and I think. I think about where the man I used to know has gone. The man that I knew myself to be. I sit here in the silence, save for the humming of my laptop, and I wonder where I have been all this time. He fell into a bottomless hole, into some lightless abyss, down, down into the furthest reaches of his heart and mind. I have been lost. And I do not recognise the man that sits here now, in this unlit room, in front of this screen. Yes, to a certain extent we are all shells of something else, something that is us-but-not-us. But what happens when we become too much of these other things, too hollow, too much the shell and not the filled whole? If we do not notice that we are now but shells, then we become something else entirely—someone else entirely. And, if we are lucky enough to recognise that we are not ourselves any longer, we must choose what to do about it. Either we accept that we have lost ourselves, that we are drowned in our own turmoil of mis-identity, for good; or we reach out into the unknowable void, fling out our arms into the ocean of loss, and wrench ourselves back from the brink, out of the damned abyss! No, the man here now with me does not belong, he is not for this time, for this place, for this life. No, he is for the void, for the darkness, for the nothingness. And I damn him back whence he came! Because I remember. I remember who I was—who I am—and who I will always be. The shell is cracked. The emptiness refilled. The man who was is once more the man who is. For I am not of the lightless abyss. I am of the here and now. I am that which is substance and that which is whole. I, am I.

M.M.