the mad

[cidermaid]

Why do you not like those stanzas and think they don't belong?

I like my poems to smell bad. That roots out the nonbelievers.


I can show you where I'm coming from.

The insane are the most difficult to satisfy. People can kill off the American Indians, and put the blacks in the White House. But the insane don't want to be thrown a bone, they want the hands that feed them. They might be crazy but they're not stupid, they know them bones don't have any meat on them.

But the crazy people can't stand each other. They drive each up the wall, and across the ceiling. But in the end, they're all each other has.

That's what's going on here.

I guess i just particularly like the strong feel of connected images in the middle three stanzas. It is not so much that i don't like the first two and last stanzas. They feel like a seperate poem in their own right to me. (and they tell the story you have described above in isolation from the middle three in my opinion). This might just be me in my lack of connection / understanding to the subject.

As you are laying down a bit of a challenge to ask to be satisfied on what i do and don't like the easist way is to show you ...so If i was to make bold with how i would work this, I would do something along these lines:-

Only women are loved.
with men, it's only the madness,
women bleed.
and are loved for it, their bodies,
their emotional souls, are held close.

'But he doesn't care about my mind.'
well, there's more to you, that bleeds.
—this ink doesn't come from my body.
If i held you like a squid, with many arms
like an octopus?
Would you love me for my pen?

not this madness that is a part of me.
not this root that grows a life
beyond us.—
madness is a kind of land,
of its own religion. Of its own logic.

So this is the boat we share...
love is a mental illness,
where the waters that keep us afloat
separates us from the rest of the world.
—and in your mermaid logic,
you still pretend to drown in a place
where, together, we could be perfectly at home.

If others can see the many arms
of my mind, because
even my floating wreckage is washed up on the shore,
won't they be able to see the mirages
of your deserted dreams,
when they well up in such dancing eyes:
that only the soul of a mad lady could form
a vision in such a time?

And ours?
is this 'together' part of the shape
of another world than this one we share?
Where the lure of the mermaid
Is cast from within the boat.

I am sure that i have most likely completely missed the point and the deeper meaning to your work and i mean no disrespect in what i have presented above. Just some off the cuff ideas to show you what i liked and disliked..Because I though you were asking for me to qualify my comments and this seemed like the easy way to do this.
I really like quite a lot of your work ( I frequently don't completly get it and some times I'm completly confused, but i like the real and honest style of your writing and the ring of truth that i find expressed in a lot of your ideas).

AJ

(I've got to go out now but will look in again on this first thing in the morning before work so see how wrong I can be!)