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THE HOUSE OF MADNESS
By Quentin Smith
The corridor’s menacing shape of a cannon barrel
Shells my defenseless torso with vermillion
And half-darkness from the kitchen.
Another hallway hurtles towards me
From a room unknown. The murder of a city
Rages disoriented in the ashes of my fireplace.
The thunder of no voices resounds
With deafeningly, silent echoes
Off the absorbent blood walls.
The lampshade’s furious glare
Strikes wildly at the nacral space
Decaying behind the innocent curtains.
The flying sheen hijacks my thought
And ejects it beyond the scarlet flaxen
To somewhere I cannot touch, cannot reach, cannot name
Or even scream from.
I now hang with my thoughts in
The gallows of the wordlessly true.
I am no surrogate for a fantasist. I ask,
Without the petrifying distortions
of speaking. How does this
phantasmagoria, that is identical with the hidden Reality,
differ from the florid visions of pure madness?
Written 1973 and 2002 |